Kokomo Garage Sale Flip-Grow With Me
Hey Kokomo! Last year at one of our regular visits to the pediatrician office, I read an interesting fact in one of those Healthy Parenting magazines. Did you know that kids tend to get taller at a steady pace, growing about 2.5 inches each year?! After I took a minute to cry to myself about how big my babies have gotten, I remembered a fun thing my family had done when we were kids to keep track of how much we had grown. We had the “fancy” sharpie lines on the garage wall with our little signatures beside them that kept track of how much we had grown year after year. When I was little I remember thinking this was the best thing ever. Then came the thought that I would like to do something cool like this for my kids.
I knew I didn’t want to take the sharpie to my walls so I kept pondering on ways to do this. Fast forward a few weeks and I was browsing through the Kokomo Garage Sale Facebook page and I saw where someone had purchased some wood from the store for a DIY project and they were selling some miscellaneous pieces that they did not end up using for their project. I bought the wood with no specific idea on what I would be using it for, but then I realized that one of the tall and slender pieces would be perfect to use as a ruler for a way to record height.
I stained my board with a dark walnut stain and then broke out my actual ruler to make the lines. First I traced all of the lines in pencil and when I had them all complete I used black paint to fill them in. I got some very thin wood numbers that I stuck to my board with wood glue. I chose to take our ruler a step further and add my son’s name to the board which was super easy and added that personal touch. I did this with some basic letter stencils and paint. Finally, to finish it off I called in my son and wrote the month and year next to the line above his head. This project was so fun and affordable! My son is obsessed with his new “humongous ruler” and if he had the choice we would be marking his height daily. As bittersweet as it is, I know one day he is going to look at this ruler that Mom made him and be amazed and how little he used to be.
