When I first got pregnant, everyone was super excited and they told me that I either needed to buy a baby book or make my own. For those of you that don't know a baby book tracks all the baby firsts and little memories to collect so they can look back on it when they're older and be like "Oh look, I was like every other f***ing child on the face of the Earth and I learned how to do things like shit in a toilet. Wow. Go me." Seriously though, I think I've looked at my baby book maybe twice in my entire life and it was interesting for all of five seconds. So all these people are telling me to make a baby book and I looked on Pintrest and found a ton of DIY baby books. But I didn't like any of them. So I decided to make my own.
The baby book I made for my daughter is a journal. I write in it about once a week if I have time. But, I write when I actually have a strong wave of emotion for my daughter or I really want to tell her something that I know I won't remember in ten years when I can really have a conversation with her. For example; when I was pregnant, I was getting really pissed (probably because I was hormonal) because everyone kept asking me how great it was that I could feel her kicking. All I could think was "No, it's not great, it feels like she's trying to dent my rib cage and I kinda want to kick her back." And that's exactly what I wrote to my daughter. I date every entry. But I told her about the first time I felt her move, because that was pretty awesome, but then I told her how after that, I hated it. She only ever seemed to kick me in the rib cage and it pissed me off. I wrote to her about what was going on in the world while I was pregnant and about the feelings I had while pregnant. As you can imagine, there is a HUGE range of feelings in the first like ten pages because they were all during my pregnancy.
After I gave birth, I kept writing. I wrote about the day I went into labor. I wrote about how I hated her for coming late and them having to induce me. I told her about how upset I was that after thirteen hours of labor she came out looking like her goddamn dad. But I also told her about how I didn't even care because she was there and she was mine and she was the most beautiful potato-looking thing I had ever seen. After I gave birth, I started including pictures with the letters I would write to her. There's a few super cute ones of when she was first born. There's one of her and my roommate on Halloween and they're both covered in fake blood and she's laughing, there's some of her screaming, one of me holding her upside down. The funny pictures. The pictures you actually remember taking.
And that was kind of the point of my DIY Baby book. I'm not going to look back and remember that day she didn't scream at all and she giggled and ate all her food without fussing. I'm going to remember the day at 3 am when she had been screaming all night, and I got so frustrated that I started crying and she laughed at me. I don't want her to read her baby book and think she was just like every other kid. I want her to read her baby book and look at how frustrated I got with her. I want her to laugh at the fact that she yanked on my dogs ears all the time and that her favorite person in the world is covered in tattoos and picks her up by her legs. I wanted to write to show my daughter exactly what it was like to raise her, not the sugar coated version.
