when we lived in venezuela, my family and i lived in a tiny little apartment on the 7th floor of a building very close the the city. It was a one bedroom apartment with a makeshift wall that was used to turn our one bedroom into two. it came completed with curtains as doors and a ceiling that would flood every time it rained leaving our apartment full of water. we had one bunk bed in the “kids” room and slept 2 per bed my brother jorge was my companion for about 8 years. looking back i realize how hard my parents worked to make ends meet and how oblivious my brothers and i were to the fact that we were poor. we had very little but in the end we had each other and we were happy.
one of the earliest childhood memories that i have in that apartment is of my parents standing us all up against our makeshift wall/bedroom separator and measuring our height. it was always a competition for us to see who was the tallest. sometimes i took the lead which would make my older brother quite angry but most of the time we were right on point with our birth order. whatever the case, the proof was on the wall. whenever the time came for us to measure our height, we would stand up tall making sure that every cm was accounted for… because sometimes it was that close.
when we moved into my parents current home, we made sure to find another wall to decorate with our growing marks of honor. it’s still there and it’s such a sweet reminder of our time in venezuela.
ale and i wanted grace to have similar memories of us measuring her growth throughout the years. we wanted to make sure that she knew that mom and dad were right there with her, proudly displaying all of her accomplishments.
because we’re renters, we were looking for a height chart that could travel with us (have i mentioned that we’ve moved 7x in 4 years?) we knew we wanted a mobile measuring stick but did not want the traditional felt charts or to spend a pretty penny. so we decided to make one ourselves….enter our DIY growing stick…
Growing stick DIY
we used a wooden board that’s 6 feet high and 4 inch wide (i honestly think it’s a foot board or some sort of framing stick but i’m not 100% so i’ll just call it a wooden board)
painters tape– i thought it would be neat to make some sort of geometric design rather than flowers and hearts because i figured she’d grow out of hearts and not want this bad boy around for too long.
acrylic paint– i wish i could say there’s a reason why i used acrylic rather than another type of paint. the truth is that we’re on a budget and i had this paint laying around so i used it…. also, i thought the colors were pretty and they complimented each other well.
exacto knife– this helped me make the designs on the tape. i wasn’t going for perfection (obviously) but the not so matchy matchy designs work for us.
paint brushes
we tried to follow some sort of color pattern so the same color was evenly distributed throughout the stick. 
after letting it dry for a few hours we peeled the tape off and revealed our design
we used a simple nail to hold it up to the wall because we thought it was the safest and that it wouldn’t fall off easily.
our lady loves it. she’s learning her colors and seeing her point to the pink diamond and say “ink, white, blue” makes my day. the best part is watching her point to her current measurement and says “this is gracie momma.”
SUCCESS!!!
so… do you have any traditions that you’ve started with your kiddos that remind you of your childhood??
