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The other day my daughter informed me that there were only 10 days left till the end of school.

I stared at her stunned, for a moment. How is that possible, I thought. The school year just began where “second and fourth graders” were the new descriptors for my girls.

This made me think about how swiftly time with children races past us, leaving in its wake mounds of photos, papers, and clay art projects. As parents we inevitably have to address the souvenirs of our children’s lives yet we can feel overwhelmed by the task. I know some parents who are especially skilled at staying on top of the inundation of items collected throughout the years — but I am not one of them.

I started to feel like this was a defining characteristic between parents that set you on either the “totally disorganized” or “completely retentive” side of the fence. When the nagging reminders of time passage wake me up in the wee hours I think of the giant stack of photos that have not been put into albums or the pile of papers and junior essays that must be saved for posterity and I feel a low-grade panic set in.

First, I want to highlight some of the things that my parental friends have done that I admire: One mom I know writes a beautiful letter to her child on each birthday — reminding him of who he is at this particular age and how much she loves him. Another mom has all her daughter’s baby teeth saved in a porcelain-covered dish on a bed of fluffy cotton. A father I know scanned all his daughter’s precious preschool paintings and created a website gallery for his whole family to enjoy.

Let me say for the record, despite my great efforts nearly ALL baby teeth have gone the way of mini Legos and stray beads from craft toys; they simply vanished into the ether never to be retrieved again.

If only I had the skills to be just one tenth as together as those other parental folks, I lament to myself in the middle of the night. But wait … I am a self-diagnosed procrastinator. I actually bought a book about how to identify and correct your procrastination habits and I didn’t finish it. I know, it sounds like a punchline to an amateur-hour joke.

However, I did learn a few things from that book. One is that when a particular task is associated with some form of stress it is justification for The Procrastinator to relegate it to the back-burner where it will start to fester, but not go away. If you can identify why the task makes you anxious then you can attack the issue more readily. In addition to that you can build a system whereby you do the task in five-minute increments, then reward yourself for your efforts. Example: I do NOT want to clean up the hall closet; I would rather sit on a lounge chair and do the crossword. OK, Missy, (I tell myself) you can do ONE shelf of the hall closet, then take a break with your crossword; and so on, until the task is completed.

Inspired and somewhat enraged by my lackadaisical attitude I started talking to friends about my “unfinished projects syndrome.” I was shocked to learn that tons of my other parent friends had also neglected to organize mementos of their children’s youth. One mother said to me, “Oh, in the beginning I put photos of my daughter straight into an album. Now I actually have TWELVE years of images sitting in boxes, just waiting to be chronologically inserted in the leather-bound albums I’ve already purchased.”

Others were horrified by how digital photos just collected (and seemingly multiplied) on their hard drives never to be printed-out or arranged into neat little booklets care of AppleStore or delivered in a mini-album to all the grandparents. Somehow, many of us never got around to the same things.

Here is a rewarding example of safe-keeping: One day my friend’s mother handed her a couple of boxes recently unearthed after an attic cleaning. The boxes essentially contained a narrative of poems, essays, drawings and hand-crafted booklets from my friend’s entire school career — kindergarten through senior year. This was a veritable treasure-trove of information and insight: “Look how alienated I was by sixth grade,” she marveled. “Look how weird my poems were after my dad died.”

Enter obsessively organized type-A mom “Sarah.” I was thoroughly impressed by her technique of collecting her daughter’s stacks of artwork, writings and other random mementos of the year. What she did was purchase a few cheap plastic binders from Target and insert whatever items she chose to keep as the year went by. She’d simply three-hole-punch each page and snap it neatly into the binder. In the clear front pocket she slipped in her daughter’s class photo and voila — a solution to the relentless deluge of papers.

So what did I do? I copied her exactly. The offending stack of school papers had sat stewing in the closet for a year now. One morning I set about sorting, three-hole punching, and weeding (which means, yes — you do get to throw out some junk along the way) this pile into FOUR plastic cheap-o binders which automatically uncluttered that shelf in the closet that was silently mocking me. Success!

The passage of time, lost teeth, and sculpty-clay figurines will forever nag at me as reminders of how fleeting this time of youth truly is. I take some solace in the fact that my daughters and I can someday lovingly comb through the artwork of elementary school, long-forgotten spelling tests and precious first-grader essays. Our need to collect and record is deeply seeded in us as an almost primitive instinct. As long as the memory is captured on film or recorded on paper a little piece of our children (and by extension ourselves) is saved forever; and sometimes that’s all the knowledge we need to allow for a decent night’s sleep.