As of last week, my parents have officially moved to Richmond. This is great for a lot of reasons (free babysitting among them), so we’re thrilled to have them just about 15 minutes away. They’re close enough to pop by for last-minute child care, which has already proved invaluable. Over the next few weeks you’ll probably see glimpses of their new place as they settle in between babysitting sessions and as we help them tackle little projects around the house—perhaps as our thanks for all that free babysitting. If you follow us on Flickr, you might already have seen that we wasted no time breaking in their community pool the day the moving truck left.
Just three days after closing on their Richmond home, my parents celebrated their 39th wedding anniversary. May is a busy month for our family—anniversary followed closely by my mom’s birthday—so we planned a small, meaningful gift to commemorate their long years together and the 32 years they spent in their previous house. Since the 39th anniversary doesn’t have a traditional token, my sisters and I decided to honor those decades in the family home with something special in addition to the small painting we gave them last month as a moving present.
My mom has always collected The Cat’s Meow keepsakes—small painted wooden blocks that represent buildings, landmarks, and personal places. She favors the pieces that mark places meaningful to our family, like the taffy shop in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where we vacation, or the West Virginia State Capitol, a nod to her home state. When I discovered that The Cat’s Meow offers custom commissions, we jumped at the chance to order a pair of personalized wooden replicas of my parents’ homes.
Using a photo of their old house, the artisan team created a custom wood block in their “My World” series. The process took about six weeks and cost roughly $99 for two pieces—one for their new Richmond house and one for their beach house. For us kids, a hundred-dollar gift is a convenient split: four siblings each contribute $25. The figurines include a tiny black cat in the window as a signature detail, which felt perfectly fitting because our family cat, Duncan, is a black cat too. He now lives with my sister Carrie, so the little feline in the piece became an adorable stand-in.
The finished replica turned out beautifully. The color reads a bit bluer than the real house, which is actually more of a grey, but that’s likely due to the photo we provided. The company also allows you to add a personalized message on the back. Their standard product descriptions often list the place name with a short historical note, so I wrote a brief summary that captures the feeling and history of our family home.
In case the text on the back is hard to read without a magnifying glass, here is what I wrote:
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 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] hosted Christmas mornings on the stairs, Easter egg hunts in the backyard, and countless family gatherings.
To explain a little context: we had a tradition of gathering the kids on the staircase for a family shot before they ran off to open presents on Christmas morning. It wasn’t meant to be practical for opening gifts on the stairs—just a festive photo tradition we all remember fondly.
When we presented the two wooden replicas to my parents this weekend while we were at the beach, they were genuinely touched. The pieces gave them a tangible memento of the home where they raised their children, a small keepsake to display in their new house while they begin this next chapter of life as nearby grandparents and much-appreciated babysitters. The thoughtful detail and the personal inscription made the gift feel like a true celebration of the years and memories made in that house.