I am a fortunate recipient of other people’s brilliance. This week’s installment of “thank you very forward thinking humans” brings us to someone that had the foresight to put on social media the idea of creating an email account for your kids, and emailing them throughout their early years to share experiences you had with them, then giving them the password to the email account when they are old enough.
ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.
For so many reasons. While we do have bins for each of them with some “firsts” (first hair cut sample, first pair of shoes etc), I do not have my act together to have printed out pictures to include in story books for each year of their life. My mom did something like that and while I enjoyed seeing them as an adult, I have proven to be uninterested and unwilling to dedicate time to doing so for my kids. And seriously, we do a lot of stuff that I want to remember and want to share with them, but I do not take pictures of everything nor do I want to be the type of parent that is constantly telling the kids “remember this, remember you did that” etc bc, well, I hated that as a kid.
Enter in email.
I CAN fire off an email describing a day or an adventure, attach some pix from the moment within a 1-2 minutes. This requires little effort (sensing a theme here?) which is the bar I set for myself on “extras” that I do after being a kickers wife, mother and human on the daily. I can write it, and my kid can read it when they are older. And they can keep it, share it, or not- it will be entirely up to them. But they will have the proof that in those moments, I took the time out to share with them just how awesome (or not) the experience was. There are so many moments in their lives that are “bottle up” worthy, and maybe this is a way to do that in the tech-savvy era. It is convenient, easy and really fun to know that they will someday read words from me from when they were little (thank you date/time stamp) telling them about our early adventures together.
Bonus feature? I sent the email addresses to the kids grandparents, aunts and uncles and I am pretty sure some of them are emailing them too. Which is super cool because we never know who will still be around as the kids age (not morbid, just realistic) so at least everyone in their world now has an opportunity to share their feelings of connection with them via written word. Such an easy, fast and free way to heap love onto the little humans who’ve lovingly commandeered my world. I encourage you to try it, and tell a friend!
Such Pretty Faces 