More Unexpected Organizing- School Papers

I am working on another unexpected organizing project- school papers.  It has nothing to do with school starting next month.  Or the fact that I totally procrastinated on making any sort of attempt at keeping the kids papers in order.  No it all has to do with a certain little boy who remains below the fifth percentile in height.  This cute little guy....





The next picture may help explain things a little more.  The boy to the left of Jeffrey is 2 days older than him.  His mother and I are good friends and grew up together.  We had the same oby and it was cool that the boys were in the nursery together!  The little boy to the right of Jeffrey is actually 6 weeks YOUNGER than Jeff. He doesn't turn 10 until mid August. He is really big for his age whereas the boy on the left is average.  So when I took Jeff for his annual check up, we decided to get a bone x-ray again to see what his bone age is compared to his age.  We've been doing this periodically since he was 5 and up till now it's just been a wait and see if he has a growth spurt since his bone age has been 3 yrs behind his true age.



We have been asked to have him be seen by an endocrinologist to make sure there is no other underlying reason for him being so small.  We never expected our children to be super tall as Jeff and are short ourselves, but we do want to make sure he will be a decent height.  And now the doctors feel it's time to move to the next phase of checking his hormones.

So what does this have to do with school papers?  

Well, the endocrinologist wants all his medical records, important baby milestones (when he talked, walked, potty trained) and school records of height and weight.  That requires report cards.  Which requires me to find his school papers.  Which requires me to search the dozen areas that I've been stashing their papers. 

Pre school and Kindergarten at the Christian school were easy to find because I dumped them in a drawer in the attic dresser.  Bad thing about it was that I thought it would be safe to keep a lot of the hand made items - you know pasta necklaces and cheerio art- since it was in the attic in a drawer.  Except that bugs found their way to said drawer and ate away at his masterpieces.  And there were some new family members that set up their home there in the cotton ball Santa crafts.  YUCK!  It was reminiscent of The Bearded Iris recent post on a delicious protein packed rice recipe.  YUM!  Except she took photos and I just carefully dumped them in the trash hoping my husband wouldn't see.

This made me realize that I need to go through all their papers and organize them better.  And since his doctor's appointment is on Wednesday, I will need to do this fast!   

I haven't decided how I want to store them.  Some bloggers put their kid's papers in hanging file boxes  and some keep them in lidded boxes.  I like both ideas.  Another thing is to make books of their artwork.  I did that with Paige's Kindergarten artwork when Oprah was giving away free photo books.  It turned out ok.  I didn't do a good job taking pictures of her items and some things got cropped funny on the pages.  So I may try that again.

Hopefully, at least I will gather everything into one area and weed out all the papers that really don't need to be saved.  So like my office desk, I am off to start working on organizing something that's long overdue but now I'm forced eager to tackle!  If anyone has any cool ideas for storing these wonderful papers that I'm sure I'll be the only one glad I saved, please leave comment and link to your site!