Documentation

A few weeks before Nora’s second birthday, I started to become overwhelmed with how quickly she was growing and changing. Of course, she’s been on a fast track to adulthood since the moment she was born, but this was different—she was literally learning, doing, and saying new things ALL.THE.TIME. I started experiencing those knock-you-over-amazing moments, as she was consistently blowing me away. And I felt like those moments were so fleeting, that I could never possibly remember them.

It made me horribly sad to think about how much I would forget.

Years ago, when my aunt was playing a large role in raising her young granddaughter, I was sitting next to her on a plane as we were all flying down to Disney World. She showed me a notebook she was keeping, just full of random sentences and quotations from her not-even-2-year-old granddaughter. Funny and amazing things she would say, all written down and documented for the future. Although I was only 15 at the time, I took note of that somewhere deep within my brain, because when I started thinking about what I could be doing to better remember snippets of Nora’s daily life and growth, this was the first thing that came to mind.

I found a little notebook at Target and committed to writing something in it every day. I’ll admit that I have not been 100% successful with it. There are times I forget to capture something, but I’ve still been managing to write down something 4-5 times a week. And I have been bad about writing things directly in the notebook, too—I have been taking little notes on my iPhone and then I sit down every once in a while and transfer everything over into the notebook, expanding the explanation/story as needed from my memory.

It’s full of my chicken scratch handwriting. But it’s just a few sentences, a short paragraph for each day. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes.

Still, it isn’t foolproof, and it isn’t without effort… but I am so glad to be doing this. Because seriously, some of the stuff that I’ve written in here over the last couple of months? I’ve already forgotten it. When I read these pages years from now, I will be able to recount moments—some of the tiniest snippets in time—that will have long since slipped away.

And that, my friends, is completely priceless. Not only for myself, but for Nora.

What do you do to preserve your everyday memories?
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I am participating in NaBloPoMo. In other words, I have committed to blogging every day during the month of November. I can’t guarantee I’ll succeed, but I’m going to try! If you’d like to join me (and a TON of others), you can click here to sign up (you only have until Monday 11/5 to do so).