Monday, December 23, 2013

The Importance of Keeping a Baby Book

...or "Why I Do What I Do"

There are a lot of great reasons to keep a baby book for your little one(s).  Keeping track of milestones is not only great for reminiscing in later years, knowing that your little one is hitting their milestones is important to track for progress, even years down the road.  The sooner a developmental delay can be identified, the sooner intervention can take place and quite possibly avoid problems later on down the road.  Your pediatrician will want to know at each of your well-baby visits that your child has not only reached specific milestones, but when they happened.

Another reason to keep a baby book is none other than avoiding the dreaded "mommy guilt."  Believe it or not, not writing down when those milestone occurred can create a great deal of negative feelings and then the overwhelming feeling that occurs when it's time to finally play catch up may keep the catch up from ever even happening.  More simply put: the more you have to write down, the less likely you'll write down any of it.  This tends to be the case, more often than not, for successive children.  Then the "mommy guilt" is even worse when the kids get older and compare the lack of documentation of their lives to their older siblings.  Luckily, my mom had four years between me and my older sister, so for being a third child, my baby book is pretty well filled out.  Of course there are gaps here and there, but the fact that I can ask my mom when I did such and such and she can say "I don't know, check your baby book" is usually good enough for me.  I have yet to compare my book to my older siblings, but what I've got is good enough for when it was made.

This brings me to my next reason for keeping a baby book, FOR YOUR CHILDREN. Inevitably kids will ask where they come from at some point, being able to pull out a book (or it's equivalent) makes answering that question a lot easier.  Of course I'm not recommending putting all of the conception details into a baby book, but typically looking through the book (or again, it's equivalent) will squash the birds and the bees question, for a while anyway.   Looking even further into the future, when your kids have their own kids, it will be important for them to compare when they did something with when their child is doing those things.  For example, my son is just now, at fifteen months, getting his first tooth.  When the one year milestone passed and no pearly whites were in sight, I of course got concerned.  But since I myself did not have too many teeth early on (thanks to being able to find out in my own baby book), a lot of my concerns were put at bay (and searching on Google was helpful as well).

Looking even further down the road, as much as we don't want to think about our own mortality, we will not always be around and giving our children the chance to read about our thoughts and feelings towards them and gain deeper insight into those early years and the relationships we developed during that time, can really make all the difference.  In the case of Video Baby Books, seeing how we look at our babies, the way we respond to them, how we talk about them, how we look at them, is a priceless treasure that will mean more to them than we will ever know.

If a typical baby book is not for you, you are not alone.  Feel free to check out my previous blog post on the typical baby book and alternatives that exist.  If you're an expectant or new parent and already feeling overwhelmed, you can always delegate the responsibility to me and have me create a Video Baby Book for you.  Check out my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.  On my website you can sign up for my mailing list to receive the "Top Ten Home Movie Failures To Avoid."

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