Keepsake Bins

For my dear mom friends reading this, you don't need me to tell you how much crap adorable projects and drawings you accumulate from your little darlings. Whether it be from daycare, church, MDO, school, doodles at home, kids are never at a loss for ways to express their creativity on paper. While I've thought about politely telling their sweet, sweet teachers that I truly don't need to see *daily* proof that they didn't sit and stare into space all day while they were away from me, I can't help but think that they may instantly throw me into the "bad mom" category for expressing such opinions.

Enter: cute, colorful file boxes. 

This little project I recently completed falls under the category of "Things I've Been Meaning to Do for Five Years" (like most other non-urgent projects around here). However, I feel a giant amount of mom guilt lifted off of my shoulders now that I can put their umpteengajillion creations into a pretty box. Which means these will no longer be sitting in a giant pile on my laundry room folding table that's been steadily accumulating since 2012. Woohoo!

Now before you go putting me into hoarder status, I do NOT keep every single doodle, scribble, or project they bring home from school. Here are the things you will find in their box:

1. Pretty much anything with a handprint or footprint. Because dangit they just get me every time.

2. Since the girls learned how to write their name this year, a token written name for the Pre-school folder.

3. Any type of drawing that "feels" sentimental. Now this can be dangerous, and a time for me to use the very difficult ability of filtering my highly sensitive sentimental gene (I come from a long line of sentimentalists). For example, a few at-home drawings I have in Campbell's (my most frequent picture creator) file: a picture she drew of our backyard at sunset, several drawings of our family she made, and a picture she drew of my dad's driving range. This is progress, people.

4. Anything from school that involves any of them answering a question. For instance, the girls' teachers asked each student how they bake a turkey at Thanksgiving and then copied their response word for word and laminated it. They were too hysterical to toss! And also, they copied 18 pre-schoolers' wordy responses onto construction paper with a sharpie. I love those angelic beings too much to toss their blood, sweat and hand cramps into the trash.

5. Any seasonal pics of Easter bunny, Santa, etc. Their personal birthday invitation and Christmas card for that year.

And in case you were wondering, I DO, in fact, feel that I am a better person than you for having printed, labeled files for school years that haven't happened yet. Winning. There is no current research I know of that proves this, but I firmly believe that printing file labels boosts the body's productions of endorphins by at least 47%. I dare you to prove that wrong.

And if that's not enough of an endorphin booster, Office Depot has these colorful bins on sale for $8 a pop currently. Woot!

Have any other winning overachievers already done this? Am I years late to the organizing game on this one?

If so, let me be blissfully and arrogantly unaware.

Happy organizing :)

xoxo

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