Memories

Last Saturday night I started going through five years of newspaper clippings that I had saved.  First, I went through and organized them by school year.  Once that part of my project was complete, I then opened up the bookcase doors and started searching through all of our photo albums starting with the year Brett was born.  I knew I was looking for items for Brett's graduation party, but wasn't sure what I wanted.  As I searched, several themes to our lives in the last 18 years became very apparent.  The most noticeable was the trips to Bloomington and Disney World, so I started piles of pictures from those events.

Next, I looked at Brett's school pictures, but I am not a big fan of head shots.  They feel so artificial.  Instead I realized that every year I had taken a picture of the Heinisch children on the first day of school, so another theme tackled.  As much as I enjoy Christmas and Easter, the pictures that stood out next were the ones from Halloween.  I loved all of the different costumes that my children have picked out over the years.  Brett's have always been the most unique - King K.Rool from Donkey Kong, the Headless Horseman, Goldfinger, etc.  Thus, another group of photos were placed on the table.  Piles of our Christmas picture cards and some of my favorite family/sibling pictures rounded out my search.

Once this was accomplished I decided to go back to all of the newspaper clippings that I had sorted by school year and reorganize them by child.  I spent several hours today putting all of Brett's "newsworthy" events into a binder.  I asked him if he wanted to look at it when I was finished this evening.  I loved listening to him exclaim, "No way, I didn't remember Thomas was on my soccer team."  "Hey look, there's Amanda when we were in elementary school."  "Mom, I didn't know I entered a mitten coloring contest at the library.  That's where I got that panda bear book I just loved."  Although my back was sore from bending over photos and articles,  hearing Brett's excitement made it all worthwhile!