At some point in time (or many points in time), every parent with young children hears something like “enjoy these moments, the time goes so fast!”
On one hand, it’s the absolute truth. When I brought my daughter home from the hospital, my newly four year old son seemed to have grown into a teenager overnight. On the other hand, it’s not necessarily a great thing for a sleep-deprived, overstimulated parent to hear - as much as we know that the time is flying, we also barely know what day it is and we may or may not have washed our hair or even peed in peace this week.
I’m not as consistent with the following ideas as I wish I were, because, well, because of the last sentence. As I write this, the laundry is piled high, my son is making our dog howl, and my husband is feeding my daughter her pureed lunch. But when my son was two and started talking, I wanted to remember some of his phrases and mispronunciations. Milestones. Whatever. I tried a few things to document these memories in the easiest way possible, and here are the two things I’ve committed to doing as much as possible.
First, I started keeping a notebook (just a standard small spiral notebook, nothing specific) in a place that I know I will physically see it. Out of sight, out of mind, right? I leave it and a pen by my bed, and when I look at it, it makes me think about what happened that day. I get the ones that I use on Amazon, and they’re cute and relatively inexpensive. One of the first things I wrote down were how he was pronouncing things:
Ollie, our dog, was pronounced “Ahh-ga.” My son would want our dog to follow him around, so we’d hear “Ahh-ga, come on!”
Watermelon was “waaga-mata.” Excavator was “Ha-ka-vee-ku.” Stephanie was “Fa-nahn-ie.” And so on. I never want to forget that little voice!
Later the same year, I wrote how much he was obsessed with the song “We Will Rock You.” And to say, “look how big I am!” He’d say, “look how huge am are!”
My writing is not pretty. It’s random things, scribbled at random times, barely legible. But they mean something to me, and I’ll remember these moments when I read them. My mom did something similar when my siblings and I were young, and turned it into an entire book of kids’ quotes - especially now, there are so many options down the line of how to best publish them when your kids are grown and you’re done writing!
Second - I have a dedicated note in my phone. If something happens that I want to remember, I can take notes here and then every once in a while, I copy over to the notebook. This option can be especially helpful if you’re more of a digital notes kind of person, especially since you can use it in tandem with phone reminders. I use Siri to remind me to take notes - for example, I have it set in my phone to remind me every year on their birthdays to write down my thoughts about the last year. I also have a reminder set to remind me every Sunday night at 9pm to jot things down about whatever the kids did that week. You can set it weekly, monthly, yearly, whatever works for you.
The third thing, which I’m sad that I didn’t think of sooner, was to start writing letters to each of them. I created a Pages document on my computer, one for Max and one for Zoe. The current plan is to give it to them on their 18th birthday, but TBD.
I started each of the letters with what age they are now, and what life is like. Made me tear up a little bit, I won’t lie to ya. Noted their personalities, things they do, what they like. Every year on their birthdays (I asked Siri to remind me to write every year on their birthdays), I’m going to look back at how much they’ve grown over the last year, and mention things that I’ve noticed. As they get older, I’ll tell them some stories of my own from when I was their age. And every year, I’m going to tell them how proud I am of them.
Just make sure to either print a copy every time you write something and put it in an envelope, or back it up somewhere. Just in case.
What I like about both of these are that there’s no pressure. I tried to do a more specific baby book, with guidelines and writing prompts, and then before I knew it I’d forgotten a few days/weeks/months and then I felt bad. This way, I write when I can or when I remember and then even if I don’t document everything, I still have some memories recorded that I may have otherwise forgotten. None of them are perfect, but they’re all a form of documentation that will remind me of things when inevitably the whirlwind settles down and these beautiful, chaotic days are a thing of the past.
These things are for me just as much as they are for them. It’s a win-win-win - I can look back on it, they can read it when they’re older, and it takes a little bit of the bittersweet sadness away when I think of how fast time is flying, and want time to stand still.