#January Joy: Capture the memories

 I know, I know, January is gone. It is NOT January anymore. But I have a couple of #January Joy challenges I still want to do and this one in particular made me very, very happy.

On December 2013 -we did not know then we were only a few weeks away from baby Y.'s birth-, I received a Baby diary that goes all the way through the child's 5th year. I remember very clearly having a small tantrum about it. I was immediately overwhelmed by having to keep track and record  so much data. I might have cried about it, about the sense of duty attached to filling in the book.

Then, when she was born, I received another baby book  from a close-relative; later a third-one from our insurance company and yet a fourth-one from my dear ex-colleagues. I was lucky that for some weird reason there was a baby-boom around us around the time we finally got blessed with our lucky cosmic miracle, and I could gift the couple of extra books to some of these friends. I could never have filled in so many.

In the end I choose to keep: "Mijn baby dagboek" by Amy Nebens, illustrated by C. Garland (the one that covers 5 years) and the Dutch version of a Beatrix Potter's BabyBook (which only covers the baby's first year, but in much more detail and with more space for photos). I just couldn't resist the beautiful illustrations and it was such a thoughtful, lovely present from my colleagues.

Funny, one of the things that immediately changed after birth was the sudden urge to hold all the memories, to keep track of everything, to capture the magic, to never let it go. And so, my previous overwhelmed feelings at such a task evaporated, disappeared.

 Last week, after Y.'s birthday I finally took the time to sit down and look at the photos we have taken all through her first momentous year and chose the ones that I would print for her books. I loved doing it. Now if we could only finish her 1st year video (an idea that we totally stole from Lauren and Kamel), I'd be the happiest girl on Earth, hint, hint, husband.