Really Pants

Special Keepsakes

Alice Evans has recently welcomed her sixth grandchild, Emily, into the world. When Alice was young, money was tight, and sentimentalism, as her mother called it, was scrubbed out of her hair and washed down the plughole every week. All this means that, bar a few faded photographs, Alice doesn’t have much in the way of keepsakes from the time her own children were babies. Now she has to rely on her memory, which is starting to fog around the edges. Sometimes she can’t even tell which of her children is which from her baby photographs.

However, Alice is not making the same mistake twice. When her first grandson, Billy, was born, Billy’s mother gave Alice a baby gift of a hand and footprint cast that she had made from a do-it-yourself  kit, which soon took pride of place on Alice’s mantelpiece. As baby sisters and cousins came along to join Billy, Alice’s collection of baby keepsakes grew and grew.

What Alice found most amazing was the rate at which the children grew from babies, into toddlers and then into precocious schoolchildren. Not seeing them every day, each visit was a revelation in achievements, milestones and new shoes. Alice decided she needed a way to keep an eye on the little seedlings before they grew too much.

Although in her eighties, Alice is a proud silver surfer which gives her access to a whole world far beyond the limited resources available in her local village. Harking back to the old biro line on the kitchen wall, Alice decided she wanted to keep a record, and she found out that she could buy impression kits from The Keepsake Company online. Then, every birthday she could send it to the children’s mothers and receive a personalised imprint of each child’s hands and feet to add to her collection. Of course, Billy’s hands and feet barely fit in the same picture anymore, and with Emily’s arrival, Alice’s wall is going to get considerably fuller, but she doesn’t mind.

It is Emily’s mother’s milestone birthday in a few weeks, and Alice has some baby fingerprint jewellery in mind as a gift. The DIY kits are supposed to be very easy to use, but even so, Alice isn’t sure she can trust her son to manage it, so she is planning to ask a Keepsake Company consultant to take the prints professionally. And maybe Alice will order herself a charm bracelet at the same time, so everyone can buy her a charm for her next birthday…