My sister is a master scrapbooker. That woman can take a few pictures from a birthday party or a 4th of July celebration and turn them into a crafty masterpiece. She has several books, filled with the documentation of her sons' sunny childhoods. Both boys also have baby books with blanks diligently filled with dates commemorating their first steps, first haircuts, family tree, etc. I've known for a long time that I'm no scrapbooker. I would love to have a scrap book, but I don't want to make a scrap book. It's boring and you have to have tools and stamps and hole punches in the shape of cute things. I really don't want anything to do with it. I recently discovered that I also don't baby book. I received two baby books when the twins were born. One is pink and one is blue so we don't forget that boys are different than girls and that girls like pink and boys like blue, even as infants who can't distinguish colors. Anyway, I wrote in Isaac's book once. I filled in the family tree (incorrectly) and then a baby started screaming so I had to stop. Honestly, if a baby hadn't started screaming, I would have found something else to do. I had way too much on my plate to worry about writing it all down as it happened, and now it's really too late to go back and do it since I have a terrible memory for dates....unless I make up the dates (which is not out of the realm of possibility). I never even took Olivia's out of the box.
I don't know if the babies will want to know what date they took their first steps. I don't care when I took mine. What I remember most from my baby book is the following passage, written by my sister (age 8 at the time) under the "Your Baby at One Year" section: "Baby Mary likes beer. If daddy leaves a beer can sitting on the table, she will pick it up and try to drink it." Additional entries document that Baby Mary threw a hairbrush into daddy's popcorn while he was eating it and Baby Mary sprayed Windex all over her baby brother's head. My parents were big believers in developing independence in the form of not much supervision. Before you judge too harshly, remember that it was the late 70's-when it was still leagalish to drive drunk, seat belts were a nuisance and leaving an 8 year old home alone was perfectly acceptable.
Instead of a baby book, I have chosen to write letters to each of the twins on their birthdays. I chose letters mostly, because I'm lazy, and writing is much easier for me than filling out forms with totally accurate, detailed, neatly printed information. The letters are about how we chose their names, what we felt when we saw them, what they brought to our family, and what we saw of their personalities in the previous year. There are rough estimates of dates of significant life events, and anecdotes about their development. I want them to know their history and how events and milestones unfolded around them. I want them to know how speical they are to us and how each of them brought something unique to our family. Most of all, I want them to know how loved they were all along the way.
