If you’re a parent, you’ll know that time flies. One minute you’re bundling your brand new baby into the car as you leave the hospital for the first time, and the next minute you’re preparing them for their first day of secondary school. Blink and you’ll miss it, including the multiple milestones that define a child’s development and that seem to come round oh so quickly. It’s natural to want to mark milestone’s in your child’s life – your parents likely did the same with you. We all know the standard keeping of the first tooth or first lock of hair, but there are other ways you can mark milestone’s beyond putting things in boxes that get tucked away and forgotten about for years at a time.
Here are some creative milestone markers you can use.
Concrete Foot/Handprints
When your child is fully grown it’s hard to believe they were once the size of a baby doll. Children can grow so much in one year (as you’ll know by how quickly they outgrow their clothes and shoes), but one way you can track their growth throughout the year is to do concrete hand or footprints. You can buy kits online, or you can make your own concrete mix.
It’s a nice idea to do a footprint or a handprint every year on their birthday so you can see how much they’ve grown the last year. You can engrave their name and the date and keep the prints as small plates or tiles.
Plant a Tree
A lovely way to mark a birthday or the first day of school is to plant a tree in the garden. The tree will continue to grow over the course of your child’s life, making it a great market for their development and a lasting legacy of their life.
Not only will the tree be a great way to mark growth, but it will also improve the look of your garden and benefit the surrounding wildlife, too.
Make Soft Furnishings from Clothes
Lots of parents like to keep clothes their children have worn, but this can take up a lot of space and is wasteful because you probably won’t get the clothes out – they’ll likely be sat in a box in the attic for years to come. Rather than doing this, immortalise those special outfits on soft furnishings like pillows, cushions and throws. You can either make it yourself or you can hire a company to do it.
It’s a nice idea to use notable outfits for this, such as the outfit your child came home in or other outfits, such as white communion shoes or their first Diwali outfit. You could even use their first blanket or pillow covers to make the soft furnishings. If you’re making a cushion, you could use the stuffing from their first teddies to fill the inside of the cover out.
Take Photos Every Year
You might have seen this on social media as people try and re-enact photos with their siblings 20 years apart, but this is a great thing to do with your children, too. It’s a lovely idea to take a photo in the same spot every year. Like some of the other ideas listed above, this is a great way to track your child’s growth, but also how much you’ve changed, too.
Summary
Everyone marks their child’s milestones in a different way, and there’s right or wrong way to do it – you don’t even have to do it all! If you do want to, it’s worth trying on of these unique ideas.