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Your Child's Birth

Commemorating a Most Special Day

By Mark Stackpole

The tiny pewter spoon with a picture of Mount Rushmore. A T-shirt that says, "I Made it to the Top!" from Yosemite National Park. The hat with mouse ears from Disneyland, the shot glass from Vegas and pukka shells from Hawaii. No matter how small the journey, we like to have a small token to remind us that we were there. It should come as no surprise, then, that we also commemorate the larger and more important experiences in our lives, and there is nothing larger or more important than the births and lives of our children.

There are many ways that parents announce and preserve the moment that their child arrives into the world. Every parent has a stash of trinkets personalized with the baby's name, weight and time and date of birth. But do you have a golf putter sized to be the exact length of your newborn? Or the baseball bat imprinted with his vital statistics? Have you set aside a box in which you will put all of the special items from her birthday? Maybe these aren't your cup of tea, but there are plenty more ways to celebrate, limited only by your imagination and your budget. (And the number of rooms, shelves and wall space you have!)

Leon Altamirano, a psychologist living in San Diego, Calif., is a new father of twins and a self-professed "collect-aholic" when it comes to remembering his family's special day. "I have come to recognize that my understanding of 'collector's items' went out the window when I became a father," he says. "Good sense and rationale seem to have completely left my brain sometime before the day my children were born. At least, that's what my wife has said."

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• Check out our Article Library.
• Talk about it!

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