What to do with kids' artwork

28 August 2014

School's in and the artwork is rolling in. To be honest, the girls create more art than I know what to do with and I have a strong anti-clutter gene. To deal with their artwork, I sort every piece that comes into the house into 3 categories:

  • Keep: This is the art that I want to keep for years. There has to be something very special about it. I organize this art similar to how I organize the girls' paperwork. Each girl has a 4 inch binder with 50 plastic sheet protectors in it. By my calculations, that's 2-4 special art pieces per school year. So far they each have 3 pieces in there including a foot-print art (so they can look back and see how tiny their feet used to be) and first drawing of the whole family. 

    First family portrait showing daddy, mommy, the twins and some random kids I don't know!
  • Display: This is the nice art that gets to be displayed for a while before it's "retired". It includes mother's day gifts displayed on the TV stand and the art I display on the kitchen wall. I remove them when I have another nice piece to replace them with. The kitchen wall display is space limited to maximum 4 pieces per kid. The girls love seeing their art displayed in this form. I must confess that all the Mothers' Day crafts I get from the girls fall into this category and none have been taken down yet because I'm emotionally attached to those and I may end up having a mommy memory box for these when they become too many to display!
    The current kitchen wall display

    My Mother's day flowers
  • Retire: This is the art work that gets retired into the recycling box that's euphemism for trashed! A lot of pieces go into immediate retirement.
What's your approach to kids' artwork. Do you attach a sentimental value to them and keep everything or do you keep some and lose some?

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