Documenting

I still feel like I’m new to this whole mothering business.  I didn’t expect to have a child, so I never paid attention to anything that may have helped me on this journey.  Fortunately, my son doesn’t have another mother to compare me to, so he thinks I’m doing just fine.  If he only knew.

Reading books about parenting early on in this process only made matters worse as I discovered there were as many books out there telling me to do things one way, as there were telling me to do the exact opposite.  I guess the good news is, there really is no standard.  Even for parents who have more than one child, I’ve heard talk about how they have to parent each child differently.

One thing I know I’ve done well, maybe obsessively compulsively too well, is document Kaleb’s life. This may be a distraction from the other areas where I am lacking as a mother, but I once counted 27 different ways I’ve meticulously recorded my son’s existence. 

Perhaps the daily journaling would have been enough, or recording his sweet voice every six months on a little “talking frame.”  These are precious things to have as children grow and change and they capture days we will never get back.  I also put his tiny hand in plaster once a year for a permanent reminder of just how small those hands were, and I have his photo taken professionally on each and every birthday.  Those photos line the stairway, so at a glance, I can see how he’s changed over the years.

The best thing I’ve done though, is write down all the cute little things Kaleb has said from time to time.  Now that he’s a teenager, there just aren’t as many cute little things that come out of his mouth, but in the early years, they were priceless.  If I wouldn’t have jotted them down at the moment, they would have been forever lost in my aging brain and we wouldn’t now have such good laughs over things he’s said.

When he was three, and very crabby late in the day, I told him, “I think you are too tired.”  “No,” he said, “I am only ONE tired.”

One Sunday at church, my husband informed me there had been a “spilling accident.”  Kaleb was four at the time.  I asked him rather sternly if he spilled his lemonade on the carpet.  “Yep,” he said.

“What made it hit the floor?” I asked.

“Gravity,” he answered.

And I knew Kaleb had spent too much time on the computer when, at age six, we were outside planting potatoes in the garden and when we were done, Kaleb asked, “What are we going to install next?”

These cute little tidbits remind me of the sweet boy tucked inside that growing teenage body and when I read them, it reboots some of the tension that builds up from time to time.  It does the same for him, as well.