See this green thing? I thought that it was the main weapon in my arsenal for fighting Second-Child Syndrome (TM).
I was going to write down all of the cute and/or important moments in Sadie's first year in this calendar, and then it was going to become my cheat-sheet for eventually producing her a baby book equal to Madeline's.
(Let's skip over the fact that Sadie is nearly 3.5 years old).
(Let's skip over the fact that Madeline's scrapbook was the first and only one that I've ever made, abandoned for the expedience of photobooks and the challenge of finding scrapbook supplies here in SE Asia).
So, I'm a couple of months into Sadie's book (making it in My Publisher, of course - keep those coupon codes coming), and I'm realizing a few flaws with my "Baby's First Year" calendar plan. One of them is point form. The boxes for the days are small - it's a calendar, naturally - so I was restricted to scrawling down things like
- "really bad baby acne"
- "more head control"
- "screamed at the Canadian Embassy"
which don't really tell the story behind why I was motived to jot those comments down for November 2008. Why were those things once worthy of recording? I'm obviously missing something!
The second thing with my calendar cheat-sheet is that it's boringly generic. I should have thought things through more before buying it, or thought about just writing down Sadie stories in a notebook (which is what I did for Madeline's scrapbook). There isn't much space for recording notes in the calendar, and the space that is provided is divided up under run-off-the-mill headings like "Your sleeping pattern is" and "Your favourite toys are".
I'm not abandoning my project, and despite it's limitations, the calendar is useful. I just wish that my memory of Sadie's first year was a little less limited, and maybe that I'd blogged more to supplement.
Remind me to never put Madeline's and Sadie's books side-by-side, though, okay?
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