My House Is A Shrine To My Family

The Kinder Studio has come up with a way to flatter our kids and recognize their artistic accomplishments in a way any parent can appreciate:

"As parents, we strongly believe that children's art, however crude or fabulous, deserves appreciation. We also know how challenging it can be to show the proper respect for each and every creation while maintaining some semblance of grown-up home decor.

After layers of tattered paintings and drawings threatened to take over our walls, we got the idea to turn our favorites into digital files which could then be reproduced as easy-to-frame prints."

When I bought FeeFiFoto last year I thought it would be fun to sell personalized gifts, but I never anticipated picking up anything for myself because I see my kids all the time anyway. I designed a photo calendar just to see how the site worked, and a photo handbag as a conversation starter, and discovered a warm feeling I hadn't expected from looking at things with pictures of my own kids, similar to the feeling I get when I hear the greeting my daughter recorded on our voice mail.

Turns out that the personalized photo items mesh well with my home decor theme of "shrine to my children." I've framed drawings and paintings; I even framed the papers on which each of them first printed their own names. Nearly every room in our home is decorated with:

a pastel,

a self portrait,


or a map of the United States my son drew free hand from memory in thefourth grade. No kidding -- by the time they finish sixth grade kids at his school map the entire world from memory.

Here's one more just for fun. Can you figure out who this person is? Take a guess, and then click on her to see if you're right. Go ahead -- I'll wait.

My most unusual mementos/artworks, are each kid's first Jack O'Lantern. It might sound peculiar but actually it was ridiculously simple although, admittedly, inadvertent. After my son's first Halloween I couldn't stand throwing away that cute little pumpkin with his lopsided smile, so I popped it in the freezer and forgot about it. Nine months later I found it to be almost entirely freeze dried; I put the pumpkin in a very low oven, turned the oven off and left the pumpkin in there overnight. The next morning the little fella was dry and firm. I did the same thing for my daughter's first pumpkin, and they both occupy a place of honor in the dining room.