Hellobee

I started journaling for my kids when I was pregnant with Scallop. At 18 weeks pregnant, I wrote my first letter to our baby, still not knowing if it was a boy or girl (we didn’t find out the sex until his birth). I wrote about the fact that we had recently been to a couple of concerts, and that I hoped the music wasn’t too loud. I also let him in on a secret that I was really hoping for him to be a girl in the end (sorry, Scallop!!). It was a very short letter, but it was the start of a journaling relationship with my kids.

I continued to write to Scallop while he was in utero. I wrote to him at 20 weeks when I felt his first kicks. I wrote to him at 25 weeks to explain that Mr. Oyster and I had taken to calling him Taz (“Tasmanian Devil”) because of how much he made my belly move around. At 30 weeks, I wrote explaining how his baby shower had gone and how much he was loving the fact that I fed him Oreo ice cream every day :). One of the entries I remember most clearly is from 36 weeks, when I wrote to him while sitting outside of “our” favorite ice cream shop while waiting to go to Mr. Oyster’s surprise work baby shower. I noted how everyone asked if I was ready to be done being pregnant yet and I said yes…and no. I really loved being pregnant (yep, I’m one of those annoying people), especially with him and in some ways I was cherishing how much easier I knew it would be to have him inside, rather than outside. On August 5th I journaled about my early labor symptoms, and continued to journal until right before we left to go to the hospital.

After Scallop arrived, I kept journaling. Every month I would write one page of notes that always started the same:

Weight
Length
Eating
Sleeping
Nicknames
Loves
Dislikes
Milestones

And then a short letter to him that went more into detail on some of the above topics, or just gushed to him about how wonderful he was (except for the sleep part….that was never wonderful haha). I wrote monthly journal entries for his first year, with an occasional extra letter if something of extra importance happened (like my father’s death). After that I tried to keep up writing a letter/update every 3 months or so, but this did start to lapse as he got older and stopped changing so significantly each month.

I knew that journaling was something I wanted to keep up with any other children we had. I wrote a letter to the baby that we unfortunately lost a few days later, telling it how much we wanted it to stick around and how much Scallop was positive it was a “baby sister.” I was very hesitant to write a letter when I got pregnant again just a couple of short months later, but I finally did at 13 weeks once we started to feel more secure.

My letters/updates have continued on with Pearl in much the same way – with the most noticeable difference being my lack of time/ambition this time around! I was still able to write an entry for her occasionally while I was pregnant, and even wrote a brief one about my labor with her. I completed an update/letter for each month of her first year, but having been seriously slacking on things since then. I try to make my entries for her more complex and longer to make up for the missed time.

I’m not sure what exactly I’ll do with these journals as time passes. I’m not sure if they’ll end up being more for me than for them, in the end, but I think it’s important enough to me that I’ll keep up with it for as long as I can. I’ve always loved writing things by hand and I wish I had more things handwritten from my mom while I was growing up. I think it will be something that my kids can look at as very personalized, with the digital age they’ll grow up in. If nothing else, I’ll be able to read back through the memories and remember my sweet babies as they were at each stage…at least in some semblance :).