I have a box sitting at the bottom of a closet at my Dad’s house. It’s full of hundreds of random photos and scrapbooking materials…from 15 years ago. I’ve promised myself for years that this year was going to be the year that I make a photo album, put together a scrapbook, or log memories in some way. I did make our wedding album, but it took five years and I was only prompted to make it because there was a 50% off sale that I wanted to take advantage of.
I have a lot of great attributes but organizing photo albums and memories are not included. And Jordan is only marginally better.
So when Henry came along I wanted to find a more realistic way to capture these memories. As everyone says, these days go by too quickly and when he’s a difficult teenager, I’ll want to go back and remind myself of the sweet baby he once was.
After a little brainstorming, Jordan and I came up with a solution that’s easy for us: we created an email account to log the memories. It serves as a digital, ongoing, scrapbook.
These emails are written directly to Henry — they’re like little love letters he’ll hopefully read at a future date (or maybe he won’t be interested and we’ll just sit around reading the notes, reminding ourselves that we once had a tiny baby).
Whenever we feel inspired we grab our phone, write up a quick email, attach a few photos or a video and send it off. When he hits certain milestones like rolling, crawling, or clapping, we’ve written a little letter to his future self to share the excitement. When he does something particularly sweet or I’m feeling a little sentimental, I send him a note.
Nothing about our system is formal. The other night I had gone out with a friend and was coming home well after his bedtime. Sitting alone on the train ride home I was scrolling through photos of him and decided to share some recent favorite memories with an email. I told him how he was such a brave little one while he was sick and how his new favorite activity is crawling after Hattie trying to pull her tail.
Eventually, I hope to create a photo album. Eventually. Maybe.
In the meantime, these little love letters are fast, free, and something I hope he will treasure when he’s older. I definitely will.
