growth chart | Bead Happily Ever After

This summer, my parents are moving to a new home. It’s a bittersweet experience for all of us. The new place is a charming little cottage on Cape Cod – so that’s the happy part.

But they have lived in the home from which they are moving for close to 56 years. They raised six children there – me included! 😉

So many happy memories in the old place . . . we’ll miss it quite a lot, but it was time for them to move on.

Recently, we all joked about how on earth we could move the “family growth chart”, which is simply a narrow strip of wall where, for a lifetime, my Dad has presided over the measuring of each one of us. In the earliest years, it was my siblings and I who were asked to “stand up straight”, as we backed up, heels against the wall, and he marked our heights with a little line, drawn in pencil, and then added names and dates.

The years flew by and eventually we were bringing husbands and wives to visit. Dad would always encourage them to have their heights recorded alongside our own. It was a family tradition by then, and we all enjoyed watching the growth chart – GROW!

Finally our babies arrived, one by one – his grandchildren! And they in turn were added. None of us ever considered this little bit of graffiti to be undesirable. Here was a case of where it was definitely ok to write on the wall!

Somehow, we are going to have to come up with a way to transport this strip of wall to the new place. A growth chart might seem like a little thing, but to us – it means a lot!