As Father's Day approached, Tessa Reagan knew exactly what she'll get her dad, and Tim Reagan knew exactly what he'll receive from his daughter. Not a tie. Not after-shave. He'll get a card with a hand-tracing inside, as he has every year since Tessa was born.

Inside the outline of her now-10-year-old hand, Tessa writes down all the fun things that she and her dad did in the past year: biking in New York and horseback riding in Colorado ("I'll never forget my father stepping onto the horse with his frightened face and shaky legs"); the plays he staged at her school, where he teaches drama; and the tetherball set she got for her birthday ("We try to kill each other," she says). Oh, and their father-daughter white-water rafting trip: "I was frightened to set foot on the blown-up raft," Tessa recalls. "My dad was rowing, and I was sitting right next to him. ... Two women fell out, which made me and my dad nervous."

Tim Reagan keeps two photos of that eventful day on his desk. Tessa keeps the memories in her heart — and now on paper, inside the outline of her hand.

It was her mom's idea.

"As we were becoming parents, we wanted to have some kind of tradition," says Lisa Agogliati, Tessa's mother. Tessa was 3 months old when Lisa first traced her hand to start their family's Father's Day tradition. "Daddy — Thank you for giving me baths, playing me songs on the piano & loving me with lots of hugs and kisses each day!" Lisa wrote for Tessa. Then she drew a tiny heart on the pinkie finger.

Tim grew up one of nine children and the youngest of five boys. "We never did anything like this for my dad," he says. "We just took it all for granted."

After a few years of receiving Tessa's hand tracings for Father's Day, Tim suggested to his wife that he probably should start keeping them. She told him she already had, that the earlier ones were safely tucked away. As of this month, there will be 11 hand tracings in the collection. In addition to reliving their fun times together, Tim says he enjoys knowing, from what Tessa writes, that "she's actually listening to the stories I tell her."

As she has grown, though, the job has become tougher.

"Every year I have to think of more things to write, because my hand gets bigger and bigger," she says. "Sometimes I just write larger."