I remember visiting my parents’ house and looking through shelves and piles of photo albums. There were baby photos, graduation photos and certificates, Linggo ng Wika photos (I don’t remember Halloween being popular back then), birthday party photos, and more. It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling of love and gratitude.
As parents, we’d love to keep these memories alive, for ourselves, for our children and even for our grandchildren. Lucky for us, we have more than the good old photo album to turn to. These days, there are so many ways we can document these milestones and occasions.
Here are 5 ways you can document your baby’s first year and beyond.
Make a Scrapbook
A scrapbook is probably what we can call our modern-day photo album. It does not only contain photos, but allows you to be creative and add in paper cut-outs, stickers, small trinkets, glitters, and more. All you need is to get your photos printed and buy scrapbooking materials in your favorite bookstore or arts and crafts store. You can also go digital and create photo books or hardbound coffee table books of your photos. Most of these digital scrapbooking providers also have templates for you to choose from so all you have to do is to drag and drop your photos. Make sure to put short captions also to tell a story about these photos.
Go Online
I’ve heard of some parents who created social media accounts for their children with the plan to turn these over to them when they reach a certain age. With smartphones and tablets, it’s just so much easier to snap photos and quickly upload them to social media and write up the story behind it. Others would opt not to create a separate social media account, and instead use a hashtag of their child’s name or something similar, like #AmberLove or #DiegosJourney. Just a word of caution though, make sure to check the privacy and security settings of your account and be aware of threats such as identity theft, stalking, etc.
Put together a memory box
Want something that’s relatively easier to do? Put together a memory box! All you need to do is to buy or make a nice box where you could put all your child’s photos and mementos like strands from his first haircut, his favorite set of mittens, etc. If you don’t trust your memory (especially after having several children!), put labels at the back of each photo or attach them to the small mementos.
Photo Wall or Gallery
Another fun way to document your child’s milestones is to put photos up on the wall. Simply have your photos printed and stick them up the wall. You may also opt to have these framed or printed on canvass. You can also buy or DIY some shelves or wire racks that are specially made for hanging photos. Depending on how much space you have, you can put this in a common area such as the living room or your child’s bedroom. Spice it up a bit by hanging frames with your child’s hand and footprints too or a have a height chart nearby to see how he has grown!
Create a Baby Memory Quilt
One not-too-common way of documenting your child’s growing up years is by creating a quilt made of his/her clothes or blankets. Seeing pieces of your child’s things also reminds us of special moments – the bib used when they first had solid food, the favorite blanket, the shirt that he did not want to take off, the pants she peed on during potty training, and so on. What’s great about a memory quilt is that you can use it as a blanket or hang it up on a wall.
There are many other ways to document your child’s early years. What’s important is to find one that suits you best, one that you can stick to and commit to, not just for your first child or his first years, but for the next kids and even the years after.
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