Cass is going to be eight in a matter of weeks. (Crap, really? He's that old?) He has a lovely filled-out baby book that I can't find and an album jammed with pictures from birth until three.
The rest of his life resides on various hard-drives and letters to grandparents.
Rosey, on the other hand, in true second-child tradition, really got the shaft. Her pictures never made it to a baby album and instead exist solely on the computer.
At this moment (although I'm SURE I have this written down somewhere) I can't really remember their birth weights. Wait. Weren't they both over nine pounds? No,wait.* They weren't. Cass was seven something and Rosemary a few ounces less. Then R dropped weight and all the foghorns of alarm started to blow in the hospital and......yeah.
This is not to say I've forgotten everything. I remember holding Cass for the very first time - where we were, the medicinal smell in the room, my mom's joyous, happy tears, how the air was rarified and still when they brought in my boy, and how lovely and wizened he looked.
And Rosey - how we ended up far from home and unpacked in a room where it seemed our cameras and videocam took up most of the available tabletop space, and how the first night my roommates baby cried most of the night and I (baby-less by way of the NICU) swallowed most of my tears and shook silently, so afraid that the spark of a girl I hadn't been able to see yet would be gone before I could hold her.
It's not the big stuff I forget. But the dates and numbers and minutiae of their sweet lives? They're just...not...there. They sift themselves silently out.
I didn't start blogging as a way to record their babyhoods, although it's been a useful tool for that, and reading the old entries (Ladies and Gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure - most of my girl child's life! Cast your eyes upon the archival dates at the left!) helps when I need to recall something. So today I'm using this power for good.
September 8th, 2009.
Rosey's very first hot lunch at school.*Ahem. That was actually me.
11 comments:
See, you knew there was point to this blogging nonsense. You just couldn't remember what it was!
I'm all agog to know how she liked it.
Guilty as charged. ED has a filled in baby book - if I knew where it was - but YD has one with a few pages used and most of her pictures have her sister in them.
Doesn't seem to have scarred her for life, however.
I am a terrible record keeper too, which is absolutely part of the reason that I blog. I do plan on, one day, handing my kids a bound copy of my blog (minus a few posts, perhaps), for nostalgia's sake.
How sweet. I only remember Shortman's birthweight because he was the exact same as me. ;-)
LOL, my blog is my way of record keeping too
I have 2 baby books but all the data is on the computer. One day I will transfer it to their baby books (which I do actually have...somewhere). All pictures are on the computer and the crashing of our hard drive and subsequent $1000 hard drive data retrieval would make a great blog post. (Please back up your baby stuff...it was a very sad day)
But get a MomAgendga. Seriously. I know it's an agenda/planner but I've been recording the special stuff/milestones/etc for the girls there as well. There's a page for each week, space for you at the top and 4 spaces on the bottom...lots of room to write what crazy things the kids have done that day. And they are very pretty and look nice siting on a bookshelf side by side as you go from year to year.
My mother is also a horrible record keeper, but the stories she tells of the memories are always so detailed I know she re-lives them.
Thank you for your comment on my post. It means more than you know that you understand.
scrapbooks are overrated.
Milk a buck forty? Wow. We're moving!
It's all slipping away from me, too. Although today at work I got hit hard by my daughter at a year and half, bald and careful. I just wanted to sit down and fall soft into memory. Funny how that happens.
I don't know those sorts of details either. I know someone who could identify the order in which her child's teeth arrived!!
Me? I just remember my son got teeth. Yay.
I think children love the stories more than they love facts and figures. You'll remember all those beautiful stories to tell them, and they'll think you're marvellous.
Oh snap, those facts are falling out of my brain faster than raindrops from a storm cloud. Thank goodness I started blogging when I did, because now that the younger has started school I can barely remember what happened with the elder. Except when I go back and check!
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