40 Days of Birthday: Day Twenty-Seven {Looks Like We Made It: Baby Book}

I wanted to apologize for the typos in my last post. If you didn’t notice them, welcome to the club. My mother kindly pointed them out to me—and when I say kindly, I’m sincere. Please don’t let this apology imply that you won’t see typos in my future posts or that yesterday’s are the first to be found in my writing. I simply apologize to let it be known that they exist and that I am aware. My mother also said I shouldn’t correct them. I did not.

I have cold. Today I’m taking a sick day. I reckoned that with my first day of class taught, I could relax a bit and nurse myself back to health. I did manage to still be productive, however. I made some progress on my new dissertation proposal while Lennon was at Kita. When he was home again, after we played, I pulled out his baby book. I hadn’t written in it for a while and had been dangerously storing information about his milestones in my brain. It was a project I’d been putting off because of other more pressing things I had to do. Now with a sick day, and a Birth-Day at that, I had a little pocket of time to catch up.

 Lennon has a vintage baby book circa the late 1940s that I found thrifting in California a few months before he was born. Whoever owned it previously let it sit, unaltered for decades—there was not a pencil mark in it and the pages were still crisp when I found it. The book lets you document your child’s life from birth until age five. Unlike contemporary baby books that I’ve seen, Lennon’s book is limited in what information they suggest you document and after the first year, they really only have pages for your child’s birthdays and Christmases. Never mind, I’ll add in what the book doesn’t include. In any case, it will be a sweet remembrance for my little man when he’s not so little.

The book’s cover is charming and I suspect was intended for use by a mother with a girl baby. Last fall, I made a cloth cover for it, not because of the pink, embossed, faux-leather paper on the front but because the folks at Thrift Town in San Francisco where the book was purchased had written the price on the front with a wax pen. I was able to remove most of the marking, but it still looked dingy. The cover will help protect it for years to come.

I did quite a bit of work on the book in the first few months of Lennon’s life. There are several pages where the information lives on my computer—such as the list of gifts Lennon received when he was first born—and simply needs to be printed and placed on the correct page, with a backing of pretty, decorative paper, of course. All of that information could just remain in Lennon’s virtual baby book on my hard drive but it wouldn’t look nearly as delightful.

Today, I jotted down Lennon’s latest weight and height numbers—three months worth. I believe that had another week gone by, the information would have completely disappeared from my memory.

I had placed all of Lennon’s cards in the blank pages at the back of the baby book several months ago only to realize it made the book too bulky to close properly. At the time, I couldn’t be bother to change the situation, but today, I removed all of the cards and even peeled the pieces of scrapbooking tape off the backs of each one. The plan is let them live loosely in a fabric pouch that I’ll make to match the cover on the book. Not as much progress was made as I’d hoped today, but pulling it out was a good reminder of the following quote, spoken by Matthew Broderick in the 1986 coming of age film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Change to “look around” to “document” and the “miss it” to “forget it” and it totally applies to my situation.