Not Just Marker

Every six months, we mark Sister's growth on the kitchen pantry door. It's a tradition we started when she was two, and it's become something much talked about and anticipated. Today was another six-month mark, so we pulled out the pink Sharpie, opened the door wide, and made another dash, just a little higher up from the last one.

There are one hundred and one cutesie charts and graphs out there to aid in marking your little sprout's growth through the months and years, but for some reason, the pantry door was the right fit for us. There's something about opening up that door, wheels turning about what to make for dinner, or thoughts on finishing packing that lunch or getting that snack or grabbing a drink... and out of the corner of your eye, you catch those colored dashes, one stacked on top of the other, some farther apart than others, all sketched to simply make tangible the slow and steady upward progress of the smallest among you. Having those marks in a place so frequently visited really serves to slow us down and make us really appreciate these times we have with our Littles (it also seems apt to mark growth on the door that leads to so much of our food).

I remember renovating our first house, which was over 100 years old, and coming across another family's childrens' growth chart, and wondering about them... who they were, where they were now, how big they'd grown to be and if they did the same for their kids... and for a moment, that family from so long ago came back alive within those old walls... it makes me smile to think of someone else finding this relic from our babies' early years and bringing us back into this space with similarly wondered thoughts. (I also can't help but wonder how many of these lines our Big Bubba will have passed by the time he is standing by himself and joins in the tradition!)

These recordings on our pantry door are not just Sharpie marker, dashes, numbers, or letters. No, they are history, they are tradition, they are love and accomplishment and pride and amazingness, and they are just getting started!