Did you guys know we’ve got a whole new category on MPMK this year? It’s called Photography & Memory Keeping and we’re stuffing it with tips busy parents can use to take great photos AND get those shots off our tech and into our lives.
Here’s Julee with our latest summer-themed post…
We just returned from our first family beach vacation. Our children absolutely loved the beach and haven’t stopped asking to go back.
For me, photography has become my way of remembering places I visit, experiences I have and sights I see. But my children enjoy much more tangible things. Everywhere we go they are collecting, touching and exploring – and this trip was no exception. We returned home with a large stash of seashells they collected throughout the trip.
As a more tangible reminder of the awesome time we had together at the beach – and as a way to store all of the seashells we accumulated – I decided to let Jason and Jenna make vacation memory jars.
Start With A Collection
Memory jars can be very simple to create and can be based on any collection, not just vacation treasures. My favorite collection that I found online was of a series of sands, with different colors and textures representing trips to different parts of the world.
To contain our collection, I purchased these glass jars from The Container Store and let the kids organize the shells as they saw fit.
They love to sort collections of things, so simply selecting and grouping the shells was a fun activity. The jars filled with shells are beautiful in themselves, but I decided to take it a bit further by connecting the jars to activities we enjoyed during our trip.
Personalize It
I asked each of my children what they enjoyed the most about our vacation: for my son, it was a boat ride, and for my daughter, it was playing in the sand. I printed several photos of each of them enjoying their favorite activities and let them add these to their jars.
My daughter chose a picture of herself making a sand angel, and my son selected a picture of us boarding a boat for an afternoon boat ride and picnic.
The photos were printed on 4×6 paper and were cut slightly to fill about 1/3 of the inside of the jar.
Don’t Forget to Document
I’m hoping these jars will be the start of an ever-growing vacation collection, so I labelled the location and date of our trip on each jar.
I used these oil-based Sharpie pens to write directly on the glass and avoid covering too much of the jar with a label, but a cute label would work too.
I couldn’t be happier with the outcome and hope you’ll find some inspiration here to start your own vacation memory collection!
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Julee