For most parents, the first few days of a new baby at home pass in a blur. Then, life starts to happen and all of those great intentions start to slip by.
One of those is keeping some sort of journal about all the experiences with baby. This isn’t surprising considering that for the first several months, the advances and changes in baby are so subtle that they don’t really lend themselves to journal entries.
“Today, baby smiled and made a cooing sound, but it was different than before. The smile was a little wider and the coo was a little higher pitched…”
You get the idea.
But, after a while, the changes come fast and furious and you will be very, very glad that you have the baby’s journal then. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to remember to start the journal because it has been so long since you have thought of it.
Use your email account to schedule an email to be sent in the future to yourself. Start with one at 3 or 4 moths, and another each month from then until you remember to start up the journal.
Remember to Add Baby and Toddler Events to Journal
Once you have started the baby or toddler journal, the difficult part becomes remembering to add entries. It seems that the most likely time to remember is twenty seconds after you climb into bed for the night!
One solution is to take advantage of the text message function of your phone along with a Twitter account or something similar. You can update Twitter with text messages if you set it up.
Add the Twitter update number to your phone’s contacts and then you can send a text when something happens. For this purpose, you don’t need any friends. It is just for you, so create a new Twitter account and don’t bother inviting anyone.
Then, whenever you actually remember and have the time to write down everything, you can either go back through your Twitter updates, or if your cell phone keeps them, you can use its history. Either way, text messages are perfect because they come with an automatic time and date stamp so you don’t have to remember.
Usually just a few words or a single sentence is all it takes to remind you of something great that happened a few days ago. (Obviously, you don’t want to wait months to do this!)
With this trick, you’ll get all those precious events into your toddler or baby journal without having to get back up in the middle of the night and without forgetting those little but amazing moments.