Method For: Keeping Up With The Kid Stuff

Raise your hand if you have kids.  Keep your hand up if they are prolific in their artistic pursuits. Now keep it raised if you have a hard time deciding which creations should be kept for posterity so you just keep everything. And stay raised if you have art folders, boxes and bins lurking about the house in addition to the countertop piles of (somewhat) current portfolio candidates.  Is your arm sore yet?  

Exercise number two.  Stand up if your kids insisted on growing up so quickly that you had no time, energy or inclination to figure out a good way to keep track of all this crap, excuse me – treasure – and now it has become the project from Hell that you will never, ever start. Ever.

The first thing I want to tell you is that you are not alone. In fact you are part of a huge community of fellow moms who are struggling with the never-ending influx of your children’s school memories!  Look around and take comfort in the fact that almost no one has taken the time to painstakingly edit, organize and commemorate their collection in some sort of album that is proudly displayed on the family room coffee table.  I have 2+ decades of motherhood under my belt. I have a wide circle of mom friends from all stages of my life representing multiple regions of the country. For 30 years I worked for Nordstrom alongside hundreds of working mothers. And since starting my own business I’ve met dozens of clients with children. Everyone has this problem. Everyone. I have been around the block on this topic and I’m telling you no one has this figured out.

Until now!

The Class Keeper App

I learned about the new Class Keeper app through my Organizing community I got really excited because this issue of how to corral kids’ art, crafts and keepsakes is one of the top challenges for my clients, regardless of the ages of their kids. It’s a system that is accessible, secure and easy to share with other family members.  It will help you rid your basement, attic and closets of all of those space-hogging bins and organize the contents in a way that you will love today and your kids will appreciate in the future (I assure you they will not want the bins, in case that was your fall-back plan.)

The Class Keeper app is the brainchild of Denise Albright Studios, a company devoted to keeping busy mothers organized.  They have created many best-selling physical organizers around scheduling, meal-planning, budgeting and corralling all things related to kids.  Their products are fantastic (and proven) if you are someone who benefits from physically writing things down (PSA: if you are browsing their site and see things you like use the code SCARY at checkout and save 50% on your order!) With this app they have taken the concept of kid-corralling to the next level as it does not require another physical thing to keep in your pursuit of a streamlined, dec-cluttered, simplified life.  The app is subscription-based and is pretty easy to use. Even though my kids’ school years are well behind me I took the opportunity to upload my archive of their stuff and found I could use the app to archive other things besides art.  Here is a list of things you could keep track of in the app that would then be available at your (and any other family members, e.g. grandparents) fingertips to enjoy anywhere, anytime:

• Artwork (especially those large, awkward & 3D pieces)

• First Day Photos

• Favorite/Significant clothing items

• Emotional Support Items (blankets, stuffs, favorite toys)

• Trophies, ribbons, medals and belts

• Anything you were going to put in the baby book that never happened

• Anything they said or did that was #cuteoverload

Using this app as your system for enjoying your children’s childhood long after it’s over (sniff) will relieve you of the mom-guilt for never finishing (or starting) the baby book, help you edit down to just a few things that you want to physically keep and enhance your memory in the years to come when it starts to get porous.

Have I sold you yet? I don’t identify as a salesperson (despite a 30 year career in retail) – I only wax this poetic when something is really compelling to me. The annual subscription is normally $59.99 but since it’s fairly new they are offering it at half the price ($29.99) for a limited time. Plus for the month of October there is the SCARY Promo code that gets you another 50% off. So it’s practically free!

NEW SERVICE offering

Now, what if your kids are older or even out of the house and the thought of going through all of those bins yourself is completely overwhelming? Well, no worries: because I think this system is going to be such a game-changer for so many people I have designed a service to help you get your full archive of memorabilia into the Class Keeper.

The Children’s Archive Package is $200 for a year’s worth of archiving (photographing + uploading to the Class Keeper) per child.  I can get your backlog into the app and then you can take over in real time. Or, if you like I can continue to archive each year as it passes and you don’t have to do a thing!

Now that my kids are mostly grown and out of the house I find myself visiting their early childhoods more frequently.  In the blurry haze of real-time child-raising it was impossible to know how much those memories would mean to me. But now that their paintings, drawings and words (the words are my favorites!) have been rescued from the musty bins in our basement I can visit them whenever I like. And so can the kids, since I’ve shared the app with them as well! It’s so much better than passing on a bunch of boxes full of stuff they don’t want. This is the way to archive their precious childhoods – this is the method for keeping the madness of the school years handy and safe. Click below to get the Class Keeper – it will change your life!