Ribbon Growth Chart

You know all about the growth charts. We have yet to do the door jam or another option for measuring my children’s heights. I’m going to kick myself if I don’t do something soon. However, today I had an idea to expand the concept. Why do we have to only measure the height of our kids? Abby, especially, has been extremely into growth for a while. She’ll wake up and stand proudly in front of me. “Look how big I’ve grown.” She’ll get off the scale, run to me and and proudly exclaim, I weigh 38.6 pounds. I don’t know why she gets so excited. She’s been between 38 and 39 now for a number of months. All I know is that I wish I had an ounce of her enthusiasm when stepping off a scale. She is constantly wanting to measure how tall she comes up compared to me. I thought she’d really enjoy an activity where we could measure a bunch of different body parts. I wanted the end result to be able to store in a compact way so that I could make one every year. This way, they could compare growth for a number of different parts throughout the years. What size were my feet or hands when I was 3? Now they have a ribbon to represent that. Today we measured the leg (hip to foot), arm span, circumference of head, hand, foot, forearm, and wrist.

The process was fairly easy…

I had a bunch of ribbon I had picked up in the dollar bin at our local craft store. I borrowed my mother-in-law’s grommet tools. I also bought a ring in the jewelry section of the craft store. Here are my materials:

The first thing we did was take the measurements.

We just took the ribbon and strung it out to the proper length corresponding with the body parts.

Then, I took one of the sheets of labels, which I had on hand and is basically a paper size white sticker. I cut out the sticker to fit on the tip of the ribbon. I wrote the body part on the sticker and stuck that to the ribbon. On the other end, I hammered out the hole for the grommet, put in the grommet and hammered down the other end. This was my first time doing that. It was easy. I know they have other fancy tools, but this little hammer set worked just great. I then put the ribbons on the ring I had chosen. One ring for each child. I also made one ribbon that said the name and age of that child.