Child Binders

I have no followers, and I rarely post, but in a fit of ambition, I have posted to two of my blogs already in the last 24 hours, and am ready for more.

Something useful.

If you're a mom, or even a person, you have all kinds of important papers. Most of us have some way of being somewhat organized. Mine was forced on me when I became a mom to two little ones at once, through foster care. They gave me a binder. Sweet! I had to keep all of my records together. When the kids were adopted, the licensing agency literally TOOK BACK their binders. The other thing that happened was I had pages and pages of adoption paperwork and records. Adopted kids are special.

So I decided to make my own binders, and since I realized in recent years that I'm kind of crafty, I wanted to make them cute. This also make them easier to find, and more fun to drag around. I like to admire them while I'm out. But they also hold a lot of important information.

They're pretty self-explanatory, but a pretty good idea. One very important piece of information: DO NOT LOSE THESE or even let them out of your sight. These have my kids' birth names, new birth certificates, finger prints, social security cards, and medical IDs. You may not want to keep all of these things in one place. But I do. So here's what I did:



This is one of my favorite tools. I just measure the height and width of the binder front and side, and trimmed scrapbook paper just a little smaller, to fit inside the plastic cover.



Here I used a hole punch to cut out complementary paper circles, for Sam's name. You can see the two kinds of paper I used.





I glued the circles over the paper to spell the kids' names.





Here are the completed binders, but that's not all.



I also needed a table of contents, and I wanted to also have their name on the inside, for added measure. Sometimes things are so crazy, with two kids in tow, that I just throw the binders, down, so they open, and I can grab the right one. No lie.

You can use whatever categories you need, obviously ours are specific to our special circumstances. The table of contents would look nicer, typed, but I used:

*Personal Records
--Birth Certificate
--Fingerprints

*Medical Records
--Bio Birth Records
--Pre-Adoption Medical
--Medical

*Placement Papers
--[Foster Care] Placement

*Adoption Papers
--Assessments
--Court Filing
--Court Orders

*School
--School Records

I also made one for myself that includes my credit report, passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, medical, and any other records that are not stored electronically.