Riley’s been concerned lately with our too-easy dismissal of his creative works from school. Every day, he comes home with one or two, sometimes more, creations that he has constructed in kindergarten. Granted, they’re not all masterpieces - some are just assignments that are colored in with blanks filled out using the right letters of numbers. Others, though, are nice works of art for a 6-year-old. A recent project that included a double rainbow, a unicorn, a castle, and a dragon is certainly the stuff of keepsake.

But how much of this should we keep? I think this is a similar question to the one skippy presents about keepsake books. I’m not sure that Riley’s formative scribblings are going to be something he’s going to want to show to his kids, but is still begs the question, how do we decide which of the things are going to turn out to be important to him when he grows up?

I have a folder of my own junk (and here I use the word “junk” with meaning) from school. I’m not sure any of it means anything to me, apart from a vague recollection of having produced it. Seeing that I haven’t seen it in a while, I could possibly go forever without ever wanting to. Recently I was thinking about some notes from a discrete math class in college, but the thought was fleeting, and the information I sought from my notes was easily recovered from the internet.

I think the solution we’ve arrived at for Riley’s complaints - which stem from the fact that there is simply so much material to review that we don’t know what to do with it or how to store it and simply end up recycling most of it without oo much thought - is twofold. First, we’re obtaining a box for Riley to keep his special papers in. The key point here is that he gets to select which things he thinks are important. And as he grows, I’m sure that will change, and we’ll swap out a bunch of stuff. Second, I’m working on a web site where he can easily take photos of his schoolwork with an iPod and upload it to the site. This way, he can take pictures of everything he brings home, so there’s nothing missed. And hopefully, eventually, the habit will extend beyond his schoolwork into extraordinary things we do now and then.

It’ll be interesting to see what he thinks is important enough to save, and I’m glad that he’ll have a way to keep things that he might like to have when he’s older.