SUBURBAN * POP

I always imagined tallying my kids’ height milestones on a doorframe or wall in the one house where their childhood would play out. But, like so many young families, we’ve spent our time in several different temporary houses where I knew sweet memories would have to eventually be left behind. Thankfully, Martha Stewart Living came to my rescue with this rad idea for a cute and portable growth chart. This project is tops because:

1. It’s simple, modern, and visually unobtrusive.

2. It can move homes with you! Start by buying a big wooden closet rod/dowel rod from a home improvement store. We started with a 4 footer, mostly for portability ease, and that got us through 7 years. My oldest just reached the top of our stick so I will need to attach a second rod in the near future. You can paint or stain the dowel like Martha did, or leave it raw like I did here. Next, choose one paint color per child, hopefully colors that will coordinate with your house so it can hang out. I chose aqua and orange, colors I knew would stick with us for a while…and colors I happened to have on hand. But how cute would B + W be???Use painter’s tape to mark each measured height with a stripe of paint. I write the date and/or their age in pencil over the stripe. I try to mark heights at each birthday but often forget until months later. The great thing about this process is that it lends itself well to randomness. I also chose to visually mark the color assigned to each child by painting a strip at their birth length and labeling it with their name, hence the very short stripes near the 17″ and 19″ marks! Ours doubles as a pretend boat oar, firehouse pole, and jumping obstacle. And occasionally as a giant sword – consider yourself warned! Happy weekend and thanks for reading!