Approved by the What’s Up Moms Medical Advisory Board
Thanks to your smartphone, you’ve been nailing it in the taking-pics-of-baby department. The kid’s been around less than a year, yet already her life is 10,000x more well-documented than your entire childhood was. One nice upside: when it’s time for her high school yearbook (and wedding) you’ll have tons of baby photos to share.
But the sheer volume of pics floating around is overwhelming. There’s a collection on your desktop, another on your broken laptop, a bunch on your iPad (where is the iPad anyway?), a zillion on your phone, and still others saved to the “cloud,” whatever that is. So how do you streamline things and get organized enough to “capsule” the first year?
Step 1: Lower the bar.
Yup. Instead of letting paralysis set in at the gigantic-ness of the project, just make the project smaller. Make it doable. The key is to create a system simple enough that you can actually maintain it moving forward.
Start by choosing your top 50 pictures from the year. We know, it’s really hard. You’re swimming in ‘em – not to mention all those versions. But you can do it! Pick 50 to represent the year and save them to a cloud-based storage system like Dropbox or Google Docs. Label the folder “Age 1.” Bam.
You’ll also want to have a way to track the day-to-day memories — you know, like what her face looked like when she first pulled herself up to standing, what she liked eating, what she suddenly stopped eating, what her bewildered and then ecstatic face looked like at her first bubble bath. All of that. If an old skool notebook-style journal is your jam, great – but some people find it easier to go digital.
One idea: create for baby a free email address. (Let’s face it, she’s almost 1, it’s about time she got gmail.) Chances are you’re all logged in all day, so this is an easy and immediate way for you and your partner to send baby notes and regale her with stories about the ludicrous things she’s up to. Attach photos and other docs as you desire (like when she does her squishy face!) and when baby’s old enough, she’ll get access to the account – an incredible record of events and gift for her and for you.
