I’ve got over 200 pages invested in this blog to date. My original goal was to post the occasional update and cute picture. Once I got rolling, it took on a life of its own as I became driven to write about my experience being a new mom. Before too many months sped by, I began to think of this as my Baby Encyclopedia. I hoped that I’d always be able to remember or look up milestones in Simon’s life in the blog. It was to be the safety net for my faulty memory.
Predictably, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. I honestly can’t remember when I stopped holding Simon in a cradle position, when we quit ferrying him around the house in his Moses basket, when the Papasan became obsolete, or when we began putting him in his swing to get him to sleep. Nor did I blog about these milestones; I didn’t know at the time that this information was significant enough to document.
It’s a little sad to realize that no amount of blogging can save me from losing some knowledge and memories. Then again, the alternative is to record our every move in a diary. That type of obsessive record-keeping leaves you like the tourist who views her entire trip through a video-camera lens: someone who preserves memories at the expense of actually making them.
On the other hand, blogging has also connected me to people in unexpected ways and jogged my memory on obscure points. Early on, I got a comment from a woman in Phoenix who had Googled “colic” and found Kid Amnesiac. She read our story of fussiness and reflux, felt better, and wrote to thank me for sharing. That was cool! Then when I confessed that Simon’s being mesmerized by TV had tempted me to use it as an occasional tool, I got a note from a total stranger in Switzerland admonishing me that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against TV for all children under two years of age for a reason. Nothing quite like a good public dressing down! But hey, it was cool in its own way.
And just yesterday, the ultimate treat arrived in my mail box. Remember my little joke about Simon’s “progression in the wrong direction”? Well, the data are in. Yesterday I opened my mail and found a letter from a familiar local address. Suspicious, I opened it to find a piece of graph paper with a post-it affixed. Yup. G. Dewey Beadle, our fabulous physics professor (and I’d call him that even if I didn’t like the alliteration) dug out his records and plotted Matt’s quiz and test scores from 1987. 95% on test 1. 85% on test 2. 80% on test 3. The regression line is an unmistakable downward diagonal. The slope is 8.3 points per quiz. Matt did, however, get an A for the semester.
So there you have it. I still can’t remember when I stopped cradling Simon, but I now can remember Matt’s physics grades from 21 years ago. And no, Simon still isn’t walking yet. He has, however, begun trying to use his spoon again after a 7 month hiatus, and he has also this week gone down to a single daily nap.