My friend Sonja sent me an email just the other day asking me how I kept a recorded memory of life with my girls. And that’s a great question. There are so many options that I’ve looked at over the last few years, since my mother gave me a beautiful journal when I told her I was pregnant for the first time, for me to record every detail of those nine months in. I love paper. Really, really love it. I’ve been keeping journals since my very first one was given to me by my grandmother, at eight-years old. So I diligently wrote in that pregnancy journal. For the first week or two. And then? Not so much. Sporadically, at best. I was so sick with nausea. And tired. And putting pen (or in my case pencil) to paper was just too much to bear.

And then Pea came along, and my husband turned me on to Mac Journal. It’s so much more convenient for me, and I have no idea why. As much as I like to write with pencils, the keyboard seems so much faster. Easier. And so I started a journal for Pea, and then a second one for Coco. Both journals begin with the day the girls were born. I update them regularly. That’s about once a week now. Which is pretty good, I think. And when something funny or noteworthy or sweet or heartbreaking or milestone-ish happens, and I’m not at home near my computer, I send myself an email from my iPhone with the brief details, and then add it in later. Other times, I simply go into the journals and quickly write a title that will jog my memory and then come back at a later date to enter in the actual “story.”

And I save everything. Too much, in fact. But over the last three years, I’ve been so happy that I did. The first sketchbook that Pea finished with all of her paintings, doodles and watercolor handprints? I glued pretty paper to the cover, wrote her name and the date it was started and finished on it, and instant gift for Pea’s grandmother, GiGi – my mother, the art maven. No gift will ever be more perfect than that, Pea’s first art portfolio.

I’ve saved every email my husband ever sent me from the time I was pregnant with Pea, through the first year of her life when she was an only child, to the day just after her 1st birthday when I realized that I might be pregnant again, through Coco’s first year of life, all of which tell the story of their lives. How my husband fell more and more in love with me, every day, as my belly grew (seventy and fifty pounds worth of growing!) with each pregnancy. I don’t know what I’m going to do with those emails, but I have a few ideas. One is to include them, somehow, along with photographs and other mementos, with the journals I’ve kept for Pea and Coco. I envision a scrapbook of sorts, a beautifully bound leather book with the each girl’s name and the date of their birth. Printed journals will be included, with photographs, hospital bassinet name plates, ticket stubs, school report cards, drawings, birthday invitations, emails and cards from loved ones. I could go on and on. But I won’t. Suffice it to say that this project? Is the sole reason I have become a hoarder of any and everything remotely related to the lives of my girls. And my big dream? Is to present each girl with her book when she herself becomes a mother for the first time.

But as I look through my desk drawer, my agenda, my kitchen junk drawer, and collect the myriad scraps of paper that I’ve hurriedly scribbled those little tidbits of life with my children, I am struck with the notion that there just has to be another project in there. Something equally amusing and clever and… memorable.

And here it is. So simple. Why didn’t I think of this? Just throw all of those humorous and mind-boggling thoughts that fly out of children’s mouths and are subsequently scribbled on found items dug from the darkest reaches of your handbag (or diaper bag), and toss them in a jar. And then do what the author of the blog where I found this idea, Brooke Reynolds (the former Senior Art Director for Martha Stewart Kids and Martha Stewart Living) does… and pull one of those random slips of paper from the jar to read and jolt yourself back to the present, and the passionate love you have for your children. Trust me, it’s kind of hard to remember that life is so good with young kids when you have a three-year old who is in the throes of an erupting temper-fit the size of Mount St. Helens…