2 Simple and Beautiful Ways To Capture Special Moments With Your Kids

There's a saying that parenting is the longest shortest time. Another way of saying that is that the days are long but the years are short.

I'm beginning to understand this first hand, as my oldest is looking toward middle school and my youngest is entering elementary. Not to be cliche but... where the heck did the time go??? For real???

As I'm moving through this process as both a mom and a storyteller, I'm thinking about the importance of documenting our memories.

When we document moments in our lives, we are embarking on an act of storytelling. We are presenving a story that can then be brought out later to be retold.

And retelling our histories helps our kids feel more connected and helps us build deeper bonds.

BUT! As a low-screen parent and advocate... where the balance between documenting and documetning so much that we get distracted from the moment?

With this in mind, I created this list of three ideas for easily and quickly documenting a moment or memory without the documenting taking over or distracting form the human connection that most likely IS the story you're trying to preserve.

• CARRY A SMALL BLANK NOTEBOOK

  I love a good pocket sized blank page notebook! It's usefull in so many ways, but one of those uses could be pulling the notebook out in a small moment and just making a note of whatever caught your eye or attention. You could make thses notes throughout the year, and then gift these little moments to your kids on their bithrdays, or collect them over the years and gift them on a special birthday. Or, you could make it a collaborative notebook where whenever something noteable happens, you and your kids pause and jot it down or draw it.

A quick sketch in my small notebook. Loved seeing my daughter sketching, so I made note of it ❤️

• CREATE A MEMORY BOWL

  Since having kids, my pockets are usually full of small treasures; acrons, pebbles, broken crayons. But everynow and then I pull out something that whisks me back to a specific place with my friends or family. A ticket stub, a note my kids scribbled to me, etc. One way to preserve stories to go back to is to decide which of these little treasures truly represents a story you want your kids to carry forward and to create a small and pretty space to hold those things. I say small and pretty because I believe it's easy to accrue a lot of little things that then feel overwheleming. So, I encourage you to find a vessel that you love (and maybe has it's own storyt significance to you), and then place those especially storyfilled items in there. Then. write a note on your calendar for a future date where you purposefully pause with your kids and take the items out and tell the stories attached to those treasures.