The Journals

In a basket on my dresser in my bedroom sits two notebooks. One boasts a pretty red flower and has a spiral binding. The other one has a textured cover with a whimsical owl stitched on it. They once contained pages that were empty, waiting

The first entry was December 28, 2006. I had three young children, who were really entertaining me. Since I had three of them, I wasn’t really any good at writing in their baby books. I wanted to preserve some of the day to day things that were happening so that one day I could look back and remember it. I grabbed a pen and started writing.

January 2^nd, 07:

“Last week, Alex and Thomas stayed at Mattie and Wayne’s for 5 days. I missed them so much. Thomas is my snuggler, and Alex is so bright-eyed and inquisitive! Mattie said that twice she caught Thomas in the bedroom. He had taken his clothes all off and was playing naked! He also woke up before her, and had a stool pulled up to the stove. She caught him just in time. Alex asked how much everything cost and wanted to know where it all came from. Elijah has been trying to crawl. He’s doing “push-ups” but hasn’t gotten I all together yet. I bet it won’t take too long.”

Some of the stories are embarrassingly funny. I can’t include them in this retelling, because the stars of the show are old enough to be embarrassed via the internet! The books became, over time, a journal of sorts. At first, I only shared snippets of funny things that happened. It gradually included a simple documentation of other life events, the birth of a child, and so on.

Here and there my feelings eeked out onto the pages with the description of whatever happened. I wrote that I was sad about something, or anxious about it. I took plenty of pictures of the boys, but I wondered if one day they would face weird things in their lives and wonder if it had just come easy for their parents. That didn’t seem real, or fair to them. What if something happened and I wasn’t able to tell them about that time when they were little?

There have been periods where I wrote several times in a week or month. Other times it’s more than a year between entries. When I opened it up this evening to browse through, I found myself laughing. Then I found myself tearing up. There were morsels of momentary hilarity that I undoubtedly thought I’d never forget, but had I not read them on the page this evening, I would have no recollection of them at all. I had no way of knowing when I started it that we only had HALF of the children we would one day have. I had no idea how fast the time would go between then and now.

One of the things I intended with such writings was to have a record in case the world went crazy and technology went dark. It seemed far fetched at the time, but in these days, one never knows! I’m going to keep writing in the books for as long as I am able to do it.