Growth Chart Project

I do not have the talent of gift giving. Thinking of the perfect gift, or even a gift, is excruciatingly difficult for me.  I was shocked when my brain connected the dots for the perfect thing for my mom’s birthday this year.  We moved around a lot growing up, so instead of marking our height in a doorway or on a wall like lots of other families, we started marking on a piece of butcher paper that we would roll up and tape at the next house.  This piece of butcher paper won’t last forever, so I decided to make a growth chart for the both of us, so that we wouldn’t start our own butcher paper chart too.

This was my project in between sessions of General Conference on Saturday and I finished them while Andrew was at the priesthood session Saturday  night. I was super nervous I would mess them up so I took way more pictures than usual so that I would have proof that it looked okay at one point. I prayed the entire time I was working and they turned out better than I even hoped.

After pricing out a few options, we decided to go with a piece of white composite board so that we wouldn’t have to find a place to stain the wood, and we could follow the general design the growth chart our neighbors have that is neutral (no points for creativity on this one). I marked off the board every six inches and then taped the inside of every other square so we could paint.  Emily woke up from her nap at this points and enjoyed walking and jumping off the balance beams.

I grabbed her a piece of scrap wood and let her choose a paint color to work next to me while I painted. After covering the area generously in our trusty rick cornstubble signs, we went to work.  Emily painted one side of her wood pink, then asked for grey and painted the other side with grey and pink.  She realized she was thirsty so Andrew helped her out.  I looked up after focusing on my painting for awhile and discovered Emily had spread her painting skills to her cup.

After the kids were in bed I pulled up Illustrator and printed off numbers (Lato font) that were 2 inches tall. I carefully cut around them, then traced around the cutouts onto the board. I filled the numbers in using a sharpie marker and the results were surprisingly great. I waited until the morning to take the tape off when the paint was completely dried.

The sign made it to my mom this last weekend, and it got the front row seat leaving us sitting three across in the back with two car seats and dreaming of buying a van the entire way there.  We still need to hang both of them and I’m super excited to see them in use.