There is so much going on during the first year with your first baby, it is hard to think about building traditions with your growing family. I don’t think I woke enough to even think about things like that until my twins were almost two!

Luckily, there is a book out there to help even the most bleary-eyed parents come up with ideas of how to begin traditions in their families that will be treasured for a lifetime. The Book of New Family Traditions: How to Create Great Rituals for Holidays and Everyday by Meg Cox has been a great resource for our family. Ms. Cox outlines ideas to develop traditions in your family, and not just for the major holidays and celebrations. She also writes about rituals involving daily routines, like dinner and bedtime, and on celebrating milestones from transitioning from bottles to cups all the way through graduations.

Ms. Cox interviewed diverse families from across the country for more than three years in her quest to find rituals and traditions on which to build her own family. This means that all of the ideas in her book have been put into practice by real families, which has given me a little more confidence to try some with ours. One of my favorites? I love the birthday balloon countdown when children pop one balloon on a chain each day until their birthday arrives.

Do you have special traditions already established that your family holds dear? In the continuing quest for more ideas to involve ritual in my children’s lives, I would love to hear what ideas you embrace in your home, too! - Sara I.