Within the first month that StarCakes was born I created a Gmail account for him. When GemCakes was born I created an e-mail address for her too. It’s not like I anticipated my one-month old babies to be sending out e-mails anytime soon. It was more so because I wanted them to have an e-mail address with their name so that they could use it in the future. Working with students in higher education I sometimes correspond with students who have unprofessional e-mail addresses. While the Cheesecake kids’ names are not all that common, I wanted to make sure that they had an e-mail address that they could use in a casual and professional setting. Furthermore, if something ever happened to us, I wanted them to know how much they meant to us and be able to have keepsakes of their childhood.

Here were my expectations for creating their e-mail addresses:

  1. Send them e-mails when they reached certain milestones
  2. Share their childhood pictures with them via Google Photos
  3. Send them an e-mail every year on their birthday about how much they’ve grown
  4. Let them know when important life events happened – i.e. when his sister was born or their first flight across the country
  5. E-mail them just because I wanted to let them know how I felt about them
  6. Have other immediate family e-mail them and share stories with them
  7. Share my hopes and dreams with them about their future
  8. Send them news articles about current important events

While I haven’t been able to all the things listed above, I do want to be more intentional about e-mailing them at least once a year on their birthdays. My hope is to give them access to this email address when they enter high school. But at the rate that kids are utilizing technology these days, they may be needing an email address sooner rather than later.

Have you thought about creating an email address for your kids? What would you e-mail them?