How to Make a Memory Box for your Kids

Making a memory box for each of my kids is something I’ve had on my to do list for a long time and finally while I was pregnant with Colton I decided it was time to get them done! I am so proud of myself for putting these together. It took some time on the front end (mainly because I had seven years of papers to organize!) but now that it’s done it will be so easy and simple to file papers going forward.

Pro tip: do this while you’re pregnant or while your child is very young so that you are organized from the get go instead of waiting until you have years of papers piled up like me!

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What is a memory box?

A memory is a box used to organized and store your child’s keepsake items. The items are organized by year and the hope is that when my children are grown up they’ll each have a neat, sorted box of special papers and things from their life.

Creating these boxes makes it easy for me (and later them, as they get older) to quickly file those things away. Also having a set size will also (hopefully) help us only keep the best of the best, our favorite things, and not want to keep every.single.thing. that they ever receive/make.

What goes in a memory box?

Some of the things I’ve been putting in ours are:

Cards I got at my baby showers
Ultrasound pictures
Weight/length cards we get at check ups
Birthday cards and other cards they received from people
Certificates and awards
Drawings, notes, and artwork they create
Drawings and notes given to them by their siblings

What does NOT go in a memory box?

There are several things that do not go in our memory boxes.

The first is anything school related. Since we homeschool, I keep the majority of their schoolwork anyway so that’s stored separately in a box for all their schoolwork.

I also don’t plan to use these to store many pictures since most of our pictures will be put in scrapbooks. I did put a folder in the very back labelled “pictures” just in case we end up with some I want to stick back there, but I don’t intend for there to be a lot.

Right now, because the boxes are not super full, I do have some non-paper items stored in the back. Eventually the box will get too full and I’ll probably create a separate box for each child for other keepsakes (stuffed animals, special shirts, that sort of thing) but right now since we have the space I do have some other things in the back of their boxes (their baby book, a ziploc bag with personalized/monogramed onesies and hats, hospital bracelets, etc.)

What supplies do I need?

These are so simple to make and only require a few things!

A file box. I used these from Target; here is a similar option on Amazon. Any file box that can hold hanging folders will work.
Hanging file folders. I chose these that come in a variety of colors so that I could have a different color for each child. Totally not necessary but I like things to be pretty so I enjoyed that.
Labels. If you want to put your child’s name on the outside like I did you’ll need a label. I used my Silhouette to cut vinyl labels out; you could also use chalkboard labels or print one out on paper and laminate it.

Pro tip: this would be great gift to make for an expectant mom!

How are they organized?

Picking the labels for our boxes was for some reason hard for me and caused me to not get the boxes made for a long time because I couldn’t decide. I considered making a folder for each grade but quickly scratched that idea beacause I’m not storing school papers and also we homeschool so grades aren’t quite as defined for us as they are for other kids.

I also thought about doing age (a folder for 1 year old, 2 years old, and so on) but decided it might get a little difficult to keep up with all the birthdays and when to switch to the next folder. Ultimately I went with calendar years – I think that’ll be the easiest to keep up with.

Each set of hanging folders came with a set of labels that I was able to run through my printer. For the labels I picked:

Before Birth (ultrasound pictures, cards from baby showers)
Medical Records (their growth cards from the pediatrician, paperwork from the hospital/midwife regarding their birth, etc.)
Then one folder for each year starting with the year they were born up until they turn 22 (Why 22? Because that’s roughly when they’d graduate from college and also because that’s how many folders I had)
The last folder is labeled “Pictures”. I’m not really sure what will go in that file and I may change that out later on as they grow and I realize there are other categories of things that I want to store, but for now that seemed like a good one to stick in there.

Keeping up with the memory boxes

Sorting through the last 7 years of papers was the hardest part of this process! I had a big stack of papers for all three (at the time, I was still pregnant with #4 when I started this) that I’d been tossing willy-nilly into a box for years. Yikes! Once I started going through the papers I realized that a lot of them I had no idea why I’d saved them – I didn’t know which child made them, what year they were created/received, what they were supposed to be, or what they said (all those notes written when kids are still learning so spell that look like gibberish!).

Pro tip: jot a note on papers you want to save with the child’s name, date, and a brief description of what the artwork is or a translation of what the note says

It took some work but I was able to figure out a lot of them and make a good enough educated guess on many of them, but sadly a lot I ended up tossing because I couldn’t remember what it was, why I’d saved it, or who it belonged to. I’m definitely kicking myself for not having a system years ago!

But now that that’s all done, going forward it should be so easy to keep up! Now when we have something I want to save I put it in a designated spot and I’ve been making a point to write notes on the papers before it goes into that “save” basket. A couple of times a year I’ll pull out the memory boxes and file away those papers. Since I’m caught up with their papers I’ll know exactly where to file them (aka the current year) so all I’ll have to do is file it by child (and since I’m labeling the papers I’ll easily know what belongs to whom).

I am so, SO glad I have this done now! It feels so good to have an easy, organized system so that I don’t have tons of keepsake papers piling up in random spots!

Pro tip: I also made one of these for myself too. It’s much smaller and not all cute like the kids’, I just used some random folders and a box we already had, but I have a folder for each year in my box and am using that to put Mother’s Day cards, birthday cards, and other notes the kids write me/drawings they make me.

Ok! Go forth and make a memory box! Whether you’re a new mom doing this from the get-go or have years of papers to sort through like I did, you’ll be so glad you got this done!