Sarah Welch
posted in Life & Home
Last week, on the last day of school, our kitchen counters disappeared under an avalanche of papers.
Art projects, sheets-upon-sheets of paper demonstrating a growing grasp of phonics and fine motor skills, weather booklets, chicken soup with rice poetry notes, – you name it, and it was on the counter.
The detritus of a 2-day-a-week preschool program and kindergarten.
As I started to tackle the mountain, my mind wandered to the hundreds of posts I have seen on Pinterest of moms painstakingly turning their children’s artwork into albums or a gallery of thumbnails (for hundreds of dollars no less).
Like this:
{image via: The Great Remember}
And this:
{image via: Apartment Therapy}
I looked back at our pile and wallowed for a moment. My urge to dump the entire lot in the trash bin seemed so harsh.
“Gosh, I must really be a bad mom,” I thought to myself.
I tried to put the brakes on the mommy-comparison doom loop that had been triggered, but as you know, once it starts, it can be hard to stop. I desperately did a mental catalog of my overbooked schedule trying to think of a time slot I could use to turn this artwork and such into a display project.
Fortunately, I was rescued by a question that flashed across my mind.
Do you really need the physical artwork in order to honor the memory of this year?
The answer was a resounding no.
I thought back to the time I had to go clean out my closet at my mom’s house a few years after graduating from college. All those notebooks from physics & AP English I thought I’d definitely go back through someday? Trash. Notes passed to and from friends in class from 3rd grade on? Ditto. Art projects? Gone.
All that stuff, while meaningful in the moment, was nothing but trash ten, fifteen, twenty years on.
And so it will be for your children too.
Tossing tired artwork most certainly does not cause the memories of the past year to disappear. You do not need physical objects to hold on to remember that your two-year-old went to a preschool program and thrived.
So rather than fetishizing the artwork, why not do everything you can to enjoy it in the moment and then get rid of it?
Here are 10 artful ways to temporarily display & otherwise enjoy artwork in the moment
Slide 1: Clothesline Display via From Greenwich Tumblr
Slide 2: Empty Frame Display via A Soft Place
Slide 3: Bulletin Boards for Each Child via 3 Meadowlake Cottage
Slide 4: Full-on Display Wall via Roomzaar
Slide 5: Create a Display Frame Using a Door via i heart organizing
Slide 6: Re-purpose Some Cookie Sheets via Budget Wise Home
Slide 7: Hang Clipboards via Clean And Centsible
Slide 8: Repurpose Old Wooden Skirt Hangers via Montydob
Slide 9: Hang Extra Large Clothespins via HGTV
Slide 10: Paint Faux Frames via Childhood 101
We display the best work from the week or month on a magnetized frame in the playroom and keep a stash of larger paper canvases with our gift wrap station to wrap presents. Anything that doesn’t make it to either of those gets tossed immediately.
What do you do? Do you think I am a minimalist Grinch on this topic?
For more organizational ideas visit GetButtonedUp.com or come find us on facebook / twitter/ pinterest}
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stop fetishizing your kids artwork
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