Sweet Memories from Turks & Caicos

When Justin and I went on vacation, I thought surely all we would do was talk about the kids and miss them. That is, in fact, how we spend our date nights which are few and far between-something that we’re working on making more frequent. We are usually too tired or feeling like we just don’t want to spend the money on a babysitter, especially when we can have the same conversations on our couch.

What we learned from flying two time zones away and completely out of the country was what we value in each other as individuals, and as parents. Sometimes it takes getting completely out of our comfort zones to realize what the most obvious. With all that said, we really dropped the ball on one thing: Sending our kids a postcard from the tropics. We shopped here and there for special little mementos for them: Bottles of sand and shells that we personally found, and a few little touristy, cheesy trinkets that they loved. We failed to send them an actual card from our trip though-which we had promised-and decided we’d make good on our promise one way or another. We decided to do the next best thing: The Creatacard app by American Greetings. That way we were able to put a montage of photos and sentiments and send it to them in the mail. Parenting means enlisting options, always.

My favorite thing to do when I visited my dad in our childhood home during the summers was go through his shoebox of old baby photos of us. I knew exactly which ones were in there: The rounded corners, the orange tint and matted surfaces. Something that I’ve noticed in the digital age is how many photos we have on our devices, and how large that number is compared to the actual, tangible, printed ones in our lives. I’m a little daunted by printing and framing my favorites, but mostly I worry about sticky, dirty little fingers all over the prints. They are fascinated by photos of themselves and family though, and they love receiving mail even more than that. This was the ultimate souvenir from what I can see, even if we didn’t actually get the cards and send them from the Caribbean.

Justin and I had a blast going through our iPhones, GoPro and DSLR digital photos looking for just the right ones to include in our montage card to the kids (note that the Creatacard app is iPad capable only so photos have to be uploaded to that devise first). I was personally touched to watch him make the card for our kids, too-he is incredibly sentimental and it’s one of the things I love the most about him. He was very selective and deliberate about the different functions he used on the app itself, which I thought was interesting and sweet. Being creative is an outlet for everyone, I think. They just need to be given a good enough reason to tap into it.

I’ll keep our memories from the babymoon in my heart forever, and somewhere in a shoebox this card will land amongst the other rare prints I have of our life as a young family. Hopefully my kids will enjoy and appreciate this old-school tradition as much as I did.

Thank you to Creatacard by American Greetings for sponsoring this post, and thank you for reading!