Posted by Nancy D.

Our two boys have amassed 14 cumulative years of school mementos ranging from macaroni necklaces and watercolors to poems and classroom awards.

While I love each and every bit the boys bring home, there gets a point each year where my house and storage capabilities groan no mas! And that's when the hard decisions begin:

Keep this clay hand print from preschool or this slightly bigger version from first grade?
Can I move this art bin to the garage, or will everything be melted into one hot mess?
Where exactly am I supposed to put a paper mache volcano?

That's when I started photographing or scanning every important relic that passed our doorstep. And I didn't stop at art and school projects. No way! I scanned report cards, photographed graffiti chalked on our garage door and more.

Now only the best of the best are kept in original form, which is still a ton, but a more manageable one.

All the others go into MemoryWeb tagged to each kid and nestled under collections like:

Johnny's art

Anything he brings home or creates outside school goes here. Each item is already separated/sorted by date in the collection, so I can quickly find one from a specific year.

Jimmy's report cards
I like to caption these with a few details on how he hit those milestones. Math is easy for him, literacy not so much. So the extra hours he spent reading in hopes he could improve enough to make the advanced math group were worth remembering.

Unintentionally inappropriate
This may well be my favorite collection. It contains everything from the 1st grade painting where the horse's tail looked decidedly like something else to spelling fails that are as priceless as they are innocent.

Creating a digital legacy has allowed me to save more, including my sanity, and I'm glad that I don't have to fret over letting a few relics hit the circular file anymore.