Dear readers: This Flashback feature originally appeared on Grandma's Briefs July 22, 2010. Thank you for reading this updated rerun!

My daughters have been grown and gone for quite some time now, but there are a few useful and/or enjoyable things from their childhood that I just can't throw away.

I'm pretty sure—or at least I'm bound and determined—that these items will one day come in handy, that they'll one day provide fun and frivolity for my grandkids.

9 THINGS I'VE KEPT 'FOR THE GRANDKIDS'

1. VHS tapes of children's movies and shows. Space Jam, Fluke, Casper and more. I can't see throwing away tapes I know kids love, but I sure don't plan on replacing them with DVDs or Blu-Ray discs (except for the Disney and Pixar ones, of course). Showtime at Grandma's will be comparable to projector films back in the day, right? As long as I hold onto a VCR, too!

2. Craft supplies and instructions. Stickers and papers and paints, oh my! Plus a gazillion craft ideas torn from magazine pages... most of which I never got around to doing with my daughters.

3. The keyboard. I have a piano now—and never really played the keyboard anyway—but the grandkids will love the electronic version that still bears the note stickers that helped the girls learn a tune or two. I still have the Disney songbooks, too, from which those stickers came. (Update: The keyboard kicked the bucket soon after this published. So PawDad and I gave our grandsons their very own keyboard for Christmas last year!)

4. Jell-O egg mold. It makes full-size Jell-O eggs for Easter! So cool! So colorful! And so nearly never used with my daughters. I just might have a Halloween-bat mold hidden away somewhere, too.

5. Halloween costumes. Witches, devils, monster masks. I got rid of the French maid costume, which was a bad idea the first time around. Kept the sari, though (despite that costume having been a super bad idea, too).

6. Puzzles. We—okay, I—like to do puzzles, and one day I just may pull out an old one to share with a new companion who's not yet grown bored with Mom/Grandma's 1500-piece challenges.

7. Sleeping bags. No doubt there will be slumber parties at Grandma's, with passels of kids lining the floor. I can dream, right? Sleeping bags are for those dreams.

8. Children's books. Does this one count? Does anyone get rid of books anyway? Not in this house! In fact, I keep adding to this collection... for the grandkids.

9. Records. I still have the vinyl (!) recordings of children's music the girls listened to as youngsters—Mousercise and more!—plus a few 45s of pop tunes they played again and again as preteens. And yes, I do still have the record player... and sometimes even still use it.

Today's question:

What have you held onto that you no longer use simply because it just might come in handy one day?