My parents have rows of old home videos and tons of photo albums documenting things from the early days of their marriage, the birth and early days of both of their children, every school or sporting event, our graduations; the shelves in their family room are chock full of a lifetime of memories. I love pulling out an album and seeing myself as a three year old looking down at my brand new brother home from the hospital, or an image of my family taking me to school on my very first day of Kindergarten. There are videos of Christmas mornings, family vacations, and random days of play in the park. I am so thankful to my parents for creating hard-copy proof of the life we have shared as a family.
My Christmas gift to my dad this past year was a VHS home video converted to a DVD. This weekend we sat down to watch the DVD together, and a flood of memories came washing over me. In this video, I had just turned six years old, my brother was three, and we were visiting various places in Europe. We were stationed in Germany until I was almost seven, and seeing the images on this particular home video brought faint memories to mind: our old apartment that overlooked two playgrounds, the smell of yeast in the air when we would pass by the German bakery, the quaint look of German buildings in cute little towns. We laughed as we recalled the places we visited, the things we did as young children, and the way we looked in 1988.
This 2 hour video made me feel very nostalgic and reflective. The Psalmist David wrote in Psalms 144:4, "They (humans) are like a breath; their days are like a fleeting shadow." Life is but a vapor. My children, ages 3 and 11 months, will not be these tender ages forever. What am I doing to document these precious days?
I grow sad as I realize that I do not have rows of home videos or shelves of photo albums. In a day and age where the convenience of a camera or video lies at my fingertips, I have accepted that keeping my memories on my Iphone is enough. I have hundreds of pictures and short videos on my phone of my boys, and I share images of our days on Instagram and Facebook, but I am not doing enough to preserve these priceless memories. In the word's of Spiderman, my Iphone has become "my gift and my curse". I love that I can snap a picture or record a short clip at a moment's notice, but I have found too much comfort in this technology that I am not "backing up" these little gems. Technology doesn't last forever; phones get accidentally washed in washing machines, laptops crash, computers get viruses. Social media sites, like MySpace, can become uncool overnight. Am I willing to sacrifice all of those memories because I didn't bother to print pictures or format my videos?
When I became a mom, exhaustion became a rite of passage. It is easy to get wrapped up in day to day responsibilities, so much so that I forget to breath and take in the little things that I will one day miss. This is why I have decided that I will do better about documenting milestones and daily life. I want to remember the way Ruly's hair has a stubborn curl in the front of his hairline that just won't lay right. I want to recall in the years to come Lincoln's sweet almost-toddler laugh as he plays "Peek-a-Boo" for the hundredth time. I want to sit down with my boys when they are in their 30s and giggle as we watch a home video of our family trip in 2017. I want to almost smell the sweet scent of baby lotion as I run my finger through an album of my children as infants. I want to give my boys what my parents gave me: hard-copy proof of our life together to remember our days that are like "a fleeting shadow".
How do you preserve your memories?
