Being a child of the 80s I don’t have many “memories” of when I was younger apart from a few photos here and there. In this age there are so many ways to capture and store memories for everyone and in this case our children. I’ve been a mom for 2 years now and I have been trying to walk the fine line between capturing memories for my daughter but also trying to live in the moment and not have a camera stuck in her face for most of day. So I’ve come up with a few ways that ensure that I’m preserving memories of Mpilo that she will cherish in the future.
Pregnancy video
While I was pregnant I decided to keep the journey off social media and rather documented my whole journey on video and photos for myself. I kept a record of my growing tummy, my experiences and my thoughts. I even documented my labour and birth.
1st year video of moments
I filmed moments of Mpilo throughout her first year of life all culminating on her 1st birthday. I edited the video and made a montage of all the moments. I’ve uploaded these to her YouTube channel (lol! yes she has a privated YouTube channel). My pregnancy video is also up there, I feel like uploading to YouTube is the best way to keep videos “safe” currently.
Instagram profile (pregnancy & first 100 days)
In this age of social media, did you even give birth if your baby doesn’t have an Insta profile (lol! I kid). I decided to have a private Instagram profile to document my pregnancy but then once Mpilo was born I carried it on to document her first 100 days of life. So I wrote anecdotes and her daily life – it’s so fun to go back and read it now because life was so different then!
Monthly emails
This is one of my favourite ways of preserving memories of Mpilo, I write an e-mail to her (yes, she has an email address) on the 8th of each month. I pretty much give her the low down of what happened that month in her life, her funny moments, her faves like: food, words, songs etc. I only started doing this a few months ago and it’s been going well so far. This is the one method that I see myself doing into the future.
If you’re a mommy, let me know how you preserve memories for your child/ren
Omg this is so adorable! My favourite reaction (having younger cousins and cousin-like children whose mothers were friends with my mother) is when they would see photos of themselves as babies and blushingly say, “imina lo?” It’s so lovely that you are creating and saving all this for Mpilo.I would definitely be a “private IG account” mama if i were to have kids. It beats just having the photos and memories on your phone — until the corporations delete the platforms, of course.
I can just imagine the “imina lo” reaction, so cute.
Iyhoo you are doing a great job, I seriously need to organize mylife ❤️Thanks for the Inspo.