Happy Mother’s Day! This day is all about you, and you deserve to be pampered and lots of appreciation on this special day!
Hopefully, you’re also getting lots of presents that are especially valuable – like handmade gifts, or the first time your little one writes in a card with sweet letters of love dedicated to you.
These are the keepsakes we should all hang on to and keep forever. Like a fine wine, sentimental items age wonderfully, and we can look back on them in future years with a new appreciation.
But as the years go by, we may find all these beautiful memories stashed away, taking up room and having to make hard choices about what to do with them.
To avoid this happening, there are five things you should keep in mind for your Mother’s Day gifts – Identify, Document, Organize, Upcycle and Limit.
Identify
Some handmade gifts can be especially creative, and your little ones might have their own explanation for what it is and what it’s called. If you have a gift like that, put a label on it.
One day, you can hand it back to them as a gift of your own when they’ve grown up and remind them exactly what they made all those years ago!
Document
The memories of how you feel on the day you receive these beautiful gifts can be more important than the keepsakes themselves.
On a special occasion like Mother’s Day, type up on a document what gifts you got and how you felt when you received them. You can look back on these journals and remind yourself just how much those keepsakes meant to you at the time.
Organize
It’s nice to keep a drawing on the fridge or card on our chest of drawers as long as you can, but sometimes it needs to make room for something else.
While it’s being used or on display, it’s good to plan ahead on how what to do with it next. It could be digitally storing it through photos, where you’re going to store it or file it in another temporary spot to be upcycled in the future.
If you’re a fan of the Netflix show, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, no doubt you’ve already made some gains in decluttering your home.
If you haven’t, we definitely recommend giving it a watch. It’s filled with amazing advice that will make your life administration so much easier and give you ideas to help you store your keepsakes more efficiently.
Upcycle
The most efficient way to keep something is to ask yourself, ‘how can I incorporate this into my daily living?’
A collection of drawings you’ve been secretly filing away can be turned into a collage you can frame and hang on the wall. You can put all your Mother’s Day and Birthday cards into a fancy binder and add it to your bookcase. Scrapbooking is another way to upcycle and you can make a social hobby out of it.
Sometimes you might unfortunately break a gift, but it doesn’t automatically mean you have to chuck it out. Again, ask yourself the question: ‘how can I incorporate this into my daily living?’ and find a new use for it.
A broken hand painted flowerpot can be glued together and turned into something to hold your pens in. Play around with what you have and get creative!
Limit
It’s tempting to want to keep everything you get from your kids, but it’s not realistic. Besides, if you have so many keepsakes, it takes the shine off the ones that are extra special.
When it comes to keepsakes that can’t be used or upcycled, you should buy a nice box to store them in for each child you have. This box is your limit for storing keepsakes, and you never get another box to go over this limit.
If you want to add something new and don’t have the room for it, declutter expert Marie Kondo’s advice for keepsakes is, ‘ask yourself what you want to keep, not what you want to chuck’. That way you have the most valuable keepsakes in the box to hang onto.
Take pride in the past, but don’t let it get in the way of the present!