keepsake boxes.

If you haven't figured it out already, Mr. Spouse is pretty phenomenal. The man smokes the best ribs in town, brings me flowers for absolutely no reason, cleans the dishes nightly, and puts together every piece of organizational furniture I throw at him. Like I said, I'm supremely spoiled. But my absolute favorite thing about Mr. Spouse is that he is FANTASTIC at holding on to little life trinkets that hold significant meaning to him. He still has the cup he was drinking from the night we met, the receipt from our first date, the ticket to our first baseball game together, and that's just year one.

In stark contrast, I am the girl that holds on to cards for a couple of months, enjoys their presence for a time, then takes a little "mental picture" (or for the really good stuff, I take an actual picture), and allows that trinket to move on so that I might reclaim the space it was occupying. You can see, that when we got married, Mr. Spouse and I had two totally different approaches to treasure-keeping. But who am I to say, "Dear, it's purging time - please throw away every tangible object you have that reminds you of a special time."? I am many things, but the "Ice Queen" is not one of them.

In my effort to practice compromising and let Mr. Spouse hang on to everything he holds most dear, I started researching ways that I could neatly store his items. I was attempting to create a win-win situation: he got to keep his stuff, I got to contain and label.

 In the meantime, since I didn't have any better ideas, I gave the Mr. a file in our filing cabinet to keep his goodies from our relationship.

But after a bit of Pinteresting (yes, it's a verb now), I stumbled upon Deliciously Organized and their idea to wrangle these treasures into a single box.

Hello geniusness! Off to Target I go! And what do I find, but these fabulous little tubs on sale and everything for me!

I went ahead and picked up three tubs so that I could give us some room to grow. After velcroing some labels to the tubs, we had a lovely little stack of memories that fits snuggly into our storage closet!

I made labels for both past and future years so that I don't have to worry about storing our treasures for years!

And an up-close look at Mr. Spouse's first box to fill:

The box is the perfect size - a bit longer than your typical piece of paper, and deep enough to hold pretty much anything you want to hang on to, and a lot of it.

{I feel that I need to explain Tiny-Tiki-Man. He was presented with our check at our six-month anniversary dinner locale. Totally normal.} 

I chose to apply the labels I created with velcro so that we can expand or shrink our little collection without worrying over the year's label on the tub.

• Both Mr. Spouse and I got our wish: marital bliss reigns.
• All it took was a box and a label.
• We have all of our happy little memories in one, perfectly organized location.

How do you store your tangible memories? Do you like to hang on to your keepsakes as much as we do?