Recording Life

You call it graffiti. I call it family history!

First, a little background . . .

I have to admit that I think it’s cute when kids write on the walls.

Okay, yes. I’m weird.

When my kids wrote on the walls, I usually accredited and dated it.

It was a record of their life.

We were living in a small house, built by my Husby, and set on a cinder block basement.

Also built by my Husby.

It was a temporary dwelling that would one day be our shop/cold-storage.

Once the real house he was building was finished.

The cinder block walls were bare and . . . grey.

Not pretty.

But as it was a temporary set-up, we endured.

Our eldest son, Mark had other ideas.

Okay, on to my story . . .

Mark was learning how to write his name.

Actually, he was getting pretty good at it.

M. A. R. K.

The trouble it is usually looked like this: K. R. A. M.

But he wasn’t even three yet, so we were pretty impressed.

We found his name scrawled everywhere.

On papers.

Furniture.

The piano.

But there was one place he most preferred.

The one place that seemed to get him the most ‘press’.

The walls.

Mark had been sitting on my bed in the cinder block basement, drawing.

I had left him happily engrossed while I went to change his baby brother’s diaper.

When I came back, the word, KRAM had been neatly inscribed on the cinder blocks.

In purple felt.

He had even followed the lines.

I looked at it.

Then at the suddenly-anxious little boy seated beneath it.

“Look at that!” I said.

He looked, then studiously turned back to his papers and continued to draw.

“Who did that?” I asked.

Again he looked.

Finally he shrugged. “Erik,” he said.

I glanced at six-month old Erik in my arms. “Erik?”

“Yup. Erik.”

“Erik wrote ‘Mark’ on the wall.”

“Yup.”

“Erik’s pretty clever.”

“Yup.”

Working on telling the truth remained.

But thirty-plus years later, K.R.A.M. is still written there.

Clearly.

Moving ahead . . .

When Mark’s eldest daughter Megan was two, she wrote on my wall.

He got a pen and put her name and the date beside it.

For posterity.

(Who says kids aren’t watching us?)

But eventually, the wall was painted and the precious record lost.

We learned something.

If you or your kids are going to chronicle your lives, make sure you do it on something that’s going to last.

Because it’s not just what you record.

But also how you record it.

So far, cinder block seems to be your best bet.