My First Blog Hop in Honor of Mom’s Day

Well, here I go.  First “Blog Hop“!  I am doing it to see who else is out there journaling and sharing in this great journey.  It’ll be my 2nd Mother’s Day.  This holiday has very quickly become my favorite.  It represents everything that I am, and has helped me understand everything my own mom and grandmother ever felt and did for their own children.  What an amazing journey.

Happy early Mother’s Day to all of my friends – on and offline – that are lucky enough to walk life’s journey through the eyes of motherhood.

BLOG HOP LIST AT ORIGINAL ‘PARTY’ LOCATION!
I couldn’t get WordPress.com to accept the script that the Hop required, so here is a link to everyone that is on the list at its original source, My Adventure in Mommyhood!

Journal Dedication Page: Happy Birthday Lucas

Today is our son’s First Birthday. I am sharing my dedication page to his journal because I know there are moms out there that will appreciate this. I’m not a poet and don’t consider myself a strong writer… but here goes.

Dear Lucas,

Happy first birthday ‘mi vida’ (my life). This journal started as a part of my own when I was just starting to dream about you. I’ve been trying to write this opening birthday entry for months, but finally realized that nothing I put down here will be able to express what your life means to us. Your first heart beat answered years of prayers, and your first breath defined who I would become – your mom above all else – for the rest of my life. You may not understand what I am about to say until you have your own family – but from the very moment you existed as a little life inside me, your life became my own, and the reason for everything daddy and I do. On that day we started to share in our life’s journey together as a family, and all of our hopes and dreams for you began…

If there is one thing that parenthood has made me realize more than ever Lucas, is that life passes us by way too fast. I can’t believe you are already a year old! Life, and the people that make it wonderful and sometimes difficult (and these are mostly all the same people by the way!), is hard to appreciate as you are living it. One of my hopes is that these pages always remind you that everything you’ve done, big and small, makes us proud and fills us with wonder. That’s something that will hold true to papa and me no matter how old you might be!

I also hope we can teach you that loving honestly and deeply makes you a happier person, because you’ll get so much of that in return. And that it all starts with family, because we don’t get through life alone. As you read this you’ll see that you have been blessed with love from a diverse ‘family’. Your great-grandparents and many, many grandparents have already loved you so much! Your tias, tios and cousins from the US and Colombia are also a big part of who you’ll become. And it’s not just blood relatives either. The friends we choose to call family over time can sometimes turn into the most special people in our lives – that’s how your dad and I came to be after all! So this journal may seemingly be about your individual life, but we are bound together by blood, love, marriage, friendships and the memories of all those things combined.

As time passes I know you will teach us many things. You already have. The hardest lesson will come when you are ready to live independently from us. A tough day, and a proud day, for any mom I am sure. But remember that a child and his parents are tied by this life’s journey together; no matter how far you may go, we are and will always be a part of you.

Until then, I hope we can find precious time to keep filling these pages together. It’s our proud job, gift and privilege to guide you through it. It is your job, gift and privilege to go live it fully. Remember to look back and cherish your past. Learn from it. Most importantly though, remember to smile each night because you are about to be blessed with a new tomorrow. New chances to live, learn, love yourself, give back to others and start fresh. Remember that every second you have is a gift dad and I wanted more than anything else. Our favorite gift to love in our entire world. Love that gift and take really, really good care if it.

Happy 1st Birthday ‘mi vida’. Love, Mama

Journals: The Gift of Memories and Stories

I finished the dedication page in my son’s first journal last night. I wanted to “give” it to him today, for his first birthday.

I have always kept a journal. When I was a teenager it was a diary full of drama, and if life was accurately chronicled, a very sad, tortured young life. That of course isn’t true, and I laugh about it now. If I wrote something I didn’t want mom to know about, I would staple the pages shut and circle the staples with red ink so that I could tell if mom or brother tampered with the evidence! As I grew up I wrote here and there, but not consistently. So there are gaps that memories and pictures help fill. I started to write again after September 11th, and as life would have it I met my husband about a year later.

When we couldn’t get pregnant writing was a necessity. I carried around a little red notebook and chronicled every doctor’s appointment, new medical terms I had to repeat, every phone call, every disappointing result, dates and more appointments. Side notes mentioned how I felt. If I didn’t have the notebook I would email myself with the subject line “Journal”, and kept a folder. I have five sentence emails from myself in the recovery room after our IVF transfer, I called that entry “Maybe Baby”.

So when we got pregnant, I decided that our “Maybe Baby” would continue to get the same type of attention that I sporadically gave myself, and that I obsessively gave our infertility treatments. I made it a habit to write notes about our pregnancy on my commute, and continued to email them to myself as our “maybe baby” became our baby with his first heart beat. I kept copies of my emails in Google docs to make sure I had back-ups.

When Lucas was 3 months I ordered a handmade leather journal from Etsy. I transcribed our pregnancy stories from my electronic journal and have been writing for Lucas during my commute ever since. I use a combination of Evernote, LilGrams and email to accomplish this. I transcribe the longer stories once a week (most of the time), in my handwriting, into his journal. All the milestones and emails from family are automatically and easily kept using LilGrams (more on that in another post). Last week Lucas started to “color” in his journal. Amazing. I hope we learns to write his name in this same journal.

My husband says he feels a little bad because if we had a girl, she might appreciate all of this much more later in life than a boy. I like to think he’ll appreciate it just enough, and I like to dream that his wife children will love it.

Happy 1st Birthday my little man!

Journal pictures kindly taken by Daniel Fiori of SweetDanib. Thanks Dani!

Coupon Alert: Shutterfly 20% off Photobooks and Free Shipping (expires9/1)

You can’t beat baby books that are easy to make! Discount expires September 1st according to the website, according to the email it expires Aug. 25th. Who knows, but it’s a good deal along with the free shipping which usually boosts the cost. Here’s the link!