Some of Oscar's schoolwork

I suppose that most of the readers here know that I was a full-time missionary for the LDS church in southern California from 1996 to 1998.  If you didn't know it previously, you do now.  Anyway, one of the things that we seemed to do with some frequency was help people move.  I recall, almost like it was yesterday, moving boxes from people's basements and attics into rented moving trucks.  While moving the boxes, it was basically impossible to not read the labels that people had written on the boxes to describe their contents.  I realized almost immediately that people had a lot of stuff they didn't really need or use.  The fact that each family seemed to have a whole room full of boxes that had not been unpacked from the last move only served to underscore my point.

If there was a common theme that tied together these rooms full of sealed boxes, it was that almost all of the rooms had several boxes full of school work, trophies, and other trinkets from the children.  In some cases, the children whose lives had been memorialized in these boxes were now old enough to have children of their own.  So why did the parents still have the boxes?  Because the children didn't want them and the parents (usually the mother) refused to throw them away.

I promised myself then that I wouldn't stockpile years worth of papers and projects.  But now that I have children of my own, these items mean more to me than I thought they would ten years ago.  I still plan on keeping my promise to myself.  But I also want to be able to save some of their work.  I thought about this a bit and decided that the best way to meet both goals is to scan and/or photograph snippets of their work.  That way I can keep a memory without having to physically hold on it.

Oscar started Kindergarten last August and I have been meaning to save more of his work but I haven't yet gotten around to doing anything about it.  Here are two things he brought home from school today.  I hope to scan in some of his work at least once a month.

Oscar's handwriting has improved a lot this year but he still has problems with some letters.

Oscar likes counting and coloring.  He still has a hard time getting the hat on the number 1 to point the correct direction.