As I prepared for my Bradley® class last week I flagged the following poem to share with my students.

“The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow

For babies grow up I’ve learned to my sorrow.

So quiet down cobwebs. Dust, go to sleep

I’m nursing my baby, and babies don’t keep”

adapted from “Song for a Fifths Child” by Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

In less than 8 months my little girl has gone  from helpless to fearless. I’m so use to her rolling, crawling, and “talking” that I struggle to remember what it was like the first few weeks of her life. I’m so thankful for technology and things like Facebook where I can document her life easily. I thought my mom had a lot of baby pictures of me but it’s not even close to the 600+ I will have of Olivia’s first year. Sometimes I think I’m going over board when I’m not able to delete a picture I have almost 3 exact versions of, but I allow myself to keep them because I know tomorrow she will be older, have more personality, be even cuter, and I will never get those precious moments back. Your baby growing up is such a bittersweet journey. You miss the tiny, sleeping, innocent angel  they were but can’t wait for them to start talking and playing and telling you “I love you mommy”. All you can do is live in the moment and try your hardest to remember them all.

There are so many ways to capture moments in your children’s life from the traditional baby book to capturing a weekly picture like seen here in “Portrait of Lotte” byFrans Hofmeester

I personally keep a blog of letters to my daughter so she can look back on family news, fights we had, cute things she said, and how much we cherish her 🙂

How do you commemorate your kids?