The Write Answer

Our first climber. How’s them apples?

“I’m a bad mum,” Tracey told me as I went to jump into bed tonight.

I may have rolled my eyes. Tracey spends almost every waking minute doing stuff for our kids.

“No, you’re not,” I assured her.

“I am. Look.”

She held up a diary of some sort. It was open at a page which she’d clearly written stuff on.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s Emily’s baby book,” she told me.

You know what? If Tracey’s a bad mother then I’m a shocking dad, because I didn’t even know Miss1 had a baby book.

“It’s huge!” I said to Tracey and turned the light off. “Goodnight.”

Three seconds later the light was back on.

“It’s not huge. It’s nearly empty.” She handed me the book and I flicked through it. “Don’t bother. The page I’ve opened it on is the only page I’ve written anything on. Do you know how many pages Grace has?”

As confession seemed to be a bit of a theme tonight I stuck with the topic and confessed I didn’t. I could have confessed more, like I don’t know what she’s written in it or where the book is kept, but I thought I’d let her set the pace for this conversation.

“She has one and a half books!”

This is a common enough problem, isn’t it? The first baby comes along and everything they do it amazing. As part of her confession Tracey told me how most of the entries in Miss9’s baby books start with the phrase “Oh My God! She’s so clever! She’s just ….” with rolled over, taken a step, tripped over her own feet, burped her name added to the end of the sentence.

“You know what the worst thing is?” Tracey asked me.

Like many of the conversations which go on in this house, I had no idea. I asked her what the worst thing was.

“I wrote this one entry when I was pregnant: Before she was even born!”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “She’s not missing out.” And fortunately, for once, I had the answer to the problem. “When she’s older she’ll have my blog to look back on. It’s all in there. She won’t feel left out at all. None of them will.” 

In fact, they’ll probably wish I hadn’t been quite so prolific.

To Miss1 the whole house is a dress up. Here she is in a loo paper scarf.

Our ’BIG FAMILY little income’ Facebook Page

 ’raising a family on little more than laughs’

11 Comments

  • Most of us are guilty of this Tracey. My youngest is about to turn 6 and I really need to get all those ‘notes’ that are written on various calendar pages into some kind of baby book. Worst thing is, his twin sisters, who are only 16 months older, both have complete books until 2 years of age!

  • BIG hugs – I can relate! Always remembered my youngest sister complaining of not having enough photos – so I have ALWAYS carried a camera with me to capture the moments my memory won’t remember 🙂

    As for baby books – HA! I threw that guilt out LONG ago!

    BIG Hugs! xKelly

  • We are having exactly the same happen in the illiterate house. The first child had a folder of photos for every week of her first 6 months. We ran a “mock” bath for number 2 the other day just so we could take some shots. She will go weeks with no photos at all.

    I’m with you. The blog will more than (over) compensate

  • Plus Tracey takes photos most days, so there will definitely be a visual diary 🙂

  • Well Tracey is definitely in the same boat as the rest of us! My eldest turns 7 this year and his baby book goes up to his first tooth. My two daughters have nothing in theirs and one is 5 and the other is 4 months! Lol

  • I think Tracey is pretty much the same as most of us… my eldest has an organised scrapbook album with milestones, and then mulitple other scrapbook albums for other special moments (and looking back many actually weren’t that special!) We have first haircut cuttings, the clothes she came home from hospital in, and a lovely written story of her birth. We currently don’t have any photos for my second child, because they disappeared when my laptop died (he thinks he just arrived at age 5),but thankfully he and my fourth child look very similar, so may just swap the names on some of the photos (is that wrong??).
    I am to the point I know one child had reflux, I know one broke their arm aged 2 and one hurt their knee, but really couldn’t tell you which one. In my defence though, I do remember the important things like how they like their sandwiches (crust on? crust of? triangles or squares?) and which shoe my slightly obsessive four year needs to go on first! 🙂

  • I read this and smiled, thinking about all the blank pages in my 2 year old’s baby book. I just sat down and wrote her a letter to put inside that book. It says that we love her dearly and she has us on the go all the time and sometimes we get so caught up in her world that we forget the real world and spending time with her is more important to me than writing in books. I told her all the funny things she says and does, all the things that she likes to do and I promised that I would write another letter when I get the chance. I traced her hand print on the bottom of that letter and put it inside her baby book.

  • I wrote one thing in my first baby ooh and nothing in the other two. I couldn’t tell you a darn thing about my three kids’ first three years of life. Will it matter? Hope not!! x

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