You'll Thank Yourself Later

Many years ago, my motto became "take pictures and write things down."  If you know me at all, you know I take lots of pictures.  Now some people think "lots" means, you go on vacation and come back with two hundred pictures from your week-long trip.  That might be okay, but for me, that'd be an overnight trip.  In fact, we just returned from five days at Walt Disney World, and I haven't sat down to count, but we have close to one thousand pictures from our trip. 

My Facebook posts fill my friends' newsfeeds, as I post ten or so pictures a week, and ninety-nine percent of them are of my kids.  I had to go buy an external hard drive, because I crashed our computer from saving all the pictures.  I have to download my iPhone monthly, because it doesn't have enough memory to handle all my pictures. 

I also write a lot.  I recently printed every post I'd ever made to Facebook, as I want to save all the posts that have specifically been about my children.  I tuck memories away on scraps of paper, write twenty page trip reports from five days at Disney, make scrapbooks with detailed captions, and so forth.  I have a book that is one big list of reasons I love my husband.  I spend time writing my feelings at any given time.

"I'm holding [my baby's] hand and I can't let go because, soon enough, she'll be letting go to blaze through the doors of kindergarten. Soon enough, she'll be in high school, holding some boy's hand...and then walking down the aisle to meet him... squeezing it as she bears his children. Soon enough, she'll be holding the hand of her own baby girl." -2008, just after the birth of my first

 

 So what's the point?

 

Many of my friends have often commented that I have an amazing memory.  I can remember tiny tidbits of information that do no one any good other than to be trivial; things like what we discussed during high school graduation (not the commencement address, but what we were having for dinner that night), or that my oldest daughter couldn't say "K" when she was younger (meaning her favorite animal at the zoo was dubbed a "tom'ere titty" instead of a merekat), or that one of my college friends can't eat pork because it turns her lips blue (although we tried and tried to get her to show us once). 

 

The point is, I can remember all those things because my pictures and my little notes jog my memory.  They keep that moment alive in my mind.  I couldn't tell you the date of D-day or more than the first line of the Gettysburg address.  I couldn't care less about trigonometry, even though I took biocalculus in college.  And I've gotten lost in the city where I grew up more than once.  But I can tell you that my best friend loves orange juice but it doesn't love her.  I can tell you that my husband caught a fawn and held it for me to pet on one of our first dates.  I can tell you that my friend in HS called the school's beans "Jabba eggs," (crazy Star Wars fans).  I remember distinctly what my first ride ever was at Walt Disney World, and how exactly they make their bangers and mash at the Rose and Crown.  I'll never forget just how many outfits my daughters were gifted when born, because I have a picture of them in almost every one. 

 

It'll work for you, too.  Life is made up of moments, and a photo catches just one second of one moment of your entire life, but it'll remind you of much more.  A journal might be hard to keep up with, but a little note will bring back emotions and smells and make your memories 3D. 

 

 

So make it a goal to take a picture a day this year.  Write down when your kid makes you laugh or cry.  Keep a journal when you go on vacation.  Jot down when your spouse does something for you for no reason at all.  Make those memories last.  When you're older, you won't have to try so hard to recall your child's first word, or why exactly you agreed to date your spouse after all, or that "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" is the sentence you learned for order of operations... even if you don't actually remember how to do the math. 

 

I promise; you'll thank yourself later.