Sorry, Oliver, you don't have a baby book

Here's the story of Oliver's baby book, or lack thereof. Friends of mine gave me a beautiful baby book when I was pregnant with Oliver. Chris brought it to the hospital, where we filled out what little we could so early in Oliver's life and affixed the sticker with Oliver's foot prints to the appropriate page, then packed the book in a box when we moved. The baby book miraculously made it out of the moving box, where it found a dedicated space among the junk and unfiled papers that make the desk in our office virtually unusable. Up through the first months of Oliver's life, I did make an attempt to throw pictures and other keepsakes into the box the book came in, knowing that at least having the materials for the baby book in one spot would give me the opportunity to finish the book at a later date instead of not at all. But I gave even that up.

This is in complete contrast to my grandmother, who not only kept, but still has, the baby books for not just her first child, but also her second. And she knew where they were. So out they came on the occasion of having all three generations of her family under one roof. The focus of the visit was naturally Oliver, so no matter the topic of conversation - how many teeth he has, what his first word was, what plans we have for his second birthday - my grandmother flipped through my dad's and uncle's baby books and was able to pull out the comparative statistics. I bet you don't believe any more than I do that my dad was able to recite the T'was the Night Before Christmas from memory at age two and a half. My humble uncle, who had long ago resigned himself to the fact that subsequent children don't get nearly the same attention as first-borns, was surprised to learn that he'd not only had a birthday party for his second birthday, but that my grandmother even took the time to write about it in his baby book. Ah, all the things you can learn from such meticulous record-keeping.

My dad told me later, much as I had suspected, that he and my mom didn't have a baby book for me. (And I'm the first born, so forget about one for my brother.) It's not that they didn't try to do one and couldn't keep up, or that they lost it. And they weren't opposed to the idea of baby books. They just weren't into them, so it really didn't occur to them to keep one. What they had, he explained, was a lot of pictures. And if the Internet and the practice of blogging had been around in 1979, I imagine my mom would have been a more prolific writer than she was picture-taker. (Oh, what I'd do to have a blog of my childhood, but for the sake of the pre-teen, teenage and even college-age Kirstens, it's probably best one doesn't exist.)

The truth is, as much as I find it really interesting to read about the childhood milestones of my dad and uncle, (and husband, since my mother-in-law dutifully kept a baby book for Chris) like my own parents, I'm not really into actually keeping one myself. They're fun to look at, but I don't feel any loss knowing that no such record exists for me. And besides the lack of interest in what is essentially scrapbooking, my ambivalence doesn't spark any motivation. I could put a lot of effort into a baby book and then Oliver will probably have one of two reactions: he won't care either, or he'll look at it once.

I think a lot of emphasis is put on baby books, which is really just one medium for preserving the memories of a childhood. Yet parents (well, probably mostly moms) feel so much pressure to make one. If we hadn't been given a baby book, we probably wouldn't have one for Oliver at all. Yet, I admittedly felt guilty about not completing something I predicted to myself before the baby's birth that I would probably fall out of habit of updating.

I have since let go of the baby book guilt even though I occasionally notice it on the desk and think, "Well, it would have been a nice keepsake if..." Instead, I know I have this blog. I don't have an organized list of milestones with dates bound in a book for Oliver, but I know the monthly updates I write provide at least a general idea of what he was doing when. But what I hope will be more interesting for Oliver someday will be to read about the random stories of his childhood sprinkled among my heavily opinionated views of parenthood told in the voice of his mom.