I’ve run across several ways to keep track of a family’s growth on-line. People have come up with several creative ways to track all sorts of things. I saw one father who took a picture of his daughter everyday for the first year of her life. Another took a picture each week until the day she married. When the pictures are strung together, the effect is beautiful.
I flashed back to the birth of our first born, David, and the half dozen “family” pictures that Ruth and I had taken professionally. We stopped the family shots after Olin-Mills stopped sending us coupons for “free photo shoots”. Later, while I was elementary school principal, we had a couple of free family photos taken by the school picture company. It was a perk for being the principal.
Whenever I see a creative idea for documenting a family’s growth, I wish I’d been there and done that. Lindsay and David have a family photo shoot each year. I love seeing the annual changes.
Ruth and I kept track of the kids growth on a two by four in our utility room. We marked a spot on the board whenever we thought about it. The procedure was simple. Each child stood on the floor flat footed. No shoes or tip-toes were allowed. We marked a line on the board and dated each mark. Sometimes we discussed how each one had grown, sometimes we just made the mark and dated it. There was no method to the madness. We just measured when the mood struck.
We began marking history on March 28, 1979. It was a Wednesday forty-one years, six months, and fifteen days ago. Jimmy Carter was President and the big news of the day was the failure of the cooling plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
BZ and David were the two original marks on the board. At two years, BZ was three quarters of an inch short of being three feet tall, while David was six and a half inches taller and two years older. Michael’s first mark came on January 7, 1980. He was just short of eighteen months and logged in at thirty-four and a quarter inches.
In the mid-nineties Michael had some friends over and the boys decided to join in. We have a single entry for the Potts twins, Morris. and Shay. They’re the only non-family members on the measuring stick. Brady made his first mark in 2006 and Eva joined in 2008. Someday, I’ll get out my calculator and figure out each of their growth spurts.
As we prepare to move, Ruth and I decided to take our bit of history with us. I bought a replacement two by four, cut out the old, and put in the new two days ago. It’s a bright shiny new board. It looks nice, but doesn’t have any history behind it. Perhaps the new owners will start one of their own. As for us, we’re taking our history with us. I plan to mount it in our new digs so we can monitor all future growth. I’m really looking forward to Mangus Strongbeard coming to Michigan in September of 2021 to help celebrate Ruth and my 50th wedding anniversary. That will probably be his first visit. If he’s not standing on his own at six months we’ll hold him flat footed, no tip toes, and add what I hope to be the first of many marks.