Pinterest makes me feel guilty that I have not made a baby book.
Pinterest also inspires me to make a baby book.
Pretty sure I’m not doing this any time soon.
I had every intention of crafting a fabulous record of my child’s babyhood. I was the second child and complained (far too much) about there being no pictures of me as a baby.
Inspired by the time-lapse style photos on various blogs, I took weekly photos of my daughter on the same bench when she was very small.
Baby on a bench-Mom photographer fail!
The bench part was a big mistake. I read to make sure to use a location they couldn’t roll off, but the idea of her being mobile seemed so far away at the time. I quickly switched to monthly photos on a chair.
At month 8, these photos required assistance from my husband. She would try to crawl off the chair or stand up. But with my husband’s assistance, I got great shots of her looking adorably at her Daddy. The best photos were not the ones taken of the specific chair pose. Like so many photos, these memories live in my laptop, and I cannot help but feeling like I have failed somehow. They should be in a book.
The big chair pose was fun, but required assistance. I did really get to know my camera in those early months.
Instead of keeping a journal, I have a running list of (what I figured were) milestones in my iPhone notes. But how and when should I start this project? Choosing the format to print, share, and save these photos is very daunting. There are so many options. My theory was to compile this information in some baby book format at my leisure. I don’t have leisure time though. (My kid doesn’t nap.)
The best photos are unplanned.
My mother recently completed and gave me my baby book. She is retired and now has leisure time. I greatly appreciated this compilation of my childhood and I enjoy that it was completed upon my mother becoming a grandmother.
I feel like my daughter will not appreciate such information until she is well into adulthood. Any project completed beforehand would simple be for me. I prefer to not live in the past. I don’t want to be bothering her with what she was like “as a baby” while she is still in the process of growing up. So if I happen to complete this project, I’m not sure I will share it with her until I become a grandmother.
My mother claims that she had a fill-in-the-blank type book. She thought all of the questions and topics were stupid. So she pulled out the pages of what she thought was relevant and included them in the scrapbook she recently gave me. This is basically the first page of the book. It also includes school projects and programs that she tossed in a box for the future. Now as a mother myself, I can appreciate that she was simply too busy to wax poetic in a baby book. Sure, she was busy working a super full time job. She was also busy playing with us, building a solid family foundation, cooking daily family dinners, and working to make sure we had every opportunity in life. Making memories takes far more time and effort than recording them.
There were no smartphones in my childhood. Treasured moments of childhood would have been nearly impossible to record in photos. But we have dear old family pictures. Since the passing of grandparents, I am now the keeper of many old family photos. I often wonder if my grandchildren will have anything like this. It is hard to fathom passing down my hard drive or an Instagram account.
I am prioritizing making the memories.
If I come up with time and a way to record or share these memories, it is a great bonus. Kudos to those who have discovered this!
However, for all the busy Moms out there, don’t worry about the baby book. Make the memories.
