As of last week, my parents officially live in Richmond. This is great for several reasons (free babysitting being near the top), so we’re very excited to have them about 15 minutes down the road where they can easily help out. You’ll likely see glimpses of their new place as they settle in and as we help them with a few projects around the house—perhaps in return for all that babysitting. If you follow our Flickr feed, you may have noticed we wasted no time breaking in their community pool as soon as the moving truck was returned.
Three days after closing on their new house, my parents celebrated their 39th wedding anniversary (just days before my mom’s birthday—May is a busy month for family celebrations). Since 39 years doesn’t have an assigned anniversary gift theme (the 35th is coral or jade and the 40th is ruby), my sisters and I decided to do something special to commemorate the 32 years they spent in their previous home. This was in addition to the painting we gave them last month as a moving gift.
My mom has always collected “The Cat’s Meow” keepsakes—small wooden blocks cut and painted to represent particular buildings, landmarks, and even people. She especially loves pieces that represent places meaningful to our family, like Dolles taffy shop in Rehoboth Beach, DE (our traditional vacation spot) and the West Virginia State Capitol (her home state). When I discovered the maker accepted custom orders, we jumped at the chance to commission a pair of custom pieces.
Using a photo of the house, they created a custom wood block of my parents’ Burke, Virginia residence. The maker calls this service “My World.” The process took roughly six weeks and cost about $99 for two pieces (we ordered one for their new Richmond house and one for their beach house). That price is a nice sweet spot for us kids since there are four of us and we each chipped in $25. If you look closely, you’ll spot a little black cat in the window—this is the company’s signature feature and it served as a perfect stand-in for our family’s black cat, Duncan, who now lives with my little sister Carrie.
They did a lovely job capturing the house—though the color leans a bit bluer than reality (the house is actually gray), which may be a result of the photo we provided. The maker also lets you customize a message on the back. Their standard collection typically includes the place name and a few historical notes, so I wrote a short summary that captures the house’s role in our family.
In case the text on the piece is hard to read in photos, it says:
This lovely residence in Burke, Virginia became home to Tom and Kathy Petersik in 1979. Their four children, Katie, Emily, John and Carrie, loved growing up here – from playing with the other neighborhood kids in the cul-de-sac to eventually pushing their own children on the swings behind the house. In their 32 years here, [their street number] played host to Christmas mornings on the stairs, Easter egg hunts in the backyard, and countless family feasts.
(To clarify, we had a tradition of gathering the kids on the stairs on Christmas morning before everyone ran to open presents—we didn’t actually try to open gifts precariously piled on the staircase.)
As we hoped, the two wooden replicas of their former home were a big hit. My parents opened them this weekend while we were at the beach, and they seemed delighted to have a small, tangible reminder of the house where they raised their family. Now those keepsakes will have a place in their new Richmond home—a nice memento of the years spent creating family memories and, of course, of future grandkid-babysitting visits.