Catching Memories with Personal Summaries and A Giggle Log

Catching
Memories
with Personal Summaries
& a Giggle Log

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When I think back to my childhood, I can only remember a handful of memories from my younger years; like the time I fell out of the tree and crawled into the house on my hands and knees because the wind had been knocked out of me,  or the time that I got stung by a bee
while riding my tricycle in the front yard.  That’s the way it is, we only remember the tragedies, and the few hard fought triumphs like when I finally got the hang of riding my bike without training wheels.  Most of our other memories somehow disappear like grains of sand slipping between our fingers.   
We have three daughters, and as they grow, I want to remember everything they do, not just for me, but also for them. Unfortunately, the idea of keeping a diary sounds wonderful in theory, but like most moms, time is something that I never have enough of.   Luckily, my husband and I came up with a solution that has been realistic for both of us.  When our girls were still very young, we started taking turns writing personal summaries on each of our girls.  The summaries would include their milestones, interests, adventures, and most importantly… their cute little quirks.  We limited each summary to a manageable one page with the intention of having them eventually placed into their scrapbooks.     
Now that years have passed,  I have actually managed to slip some of these personal summaries into their scrapbooks.   As it turns out,
my girls find great joy in flipping through their scrapbooks and reading about themselves.  The summaries give us a glimpse into how their worlds were shaped during their first years, and we get to hear their stories in both Bruce’s voice and mine.  My husband’s summaries tend to be loaded with humor, while mine carry a more sentimental tune.   
 The other thing that we took the time to create is a “Giggle Log”.   The giggle log is a cherished notebook that we keep in our dresser drawer.   It holds numerous three or four lined, dated entries.  Our youngest is 9 now, so our girls have all passed through that innocent stage of wacky questions and adorable comments.   The giggle log was born because my husband and I decided that we needed to somehow remember these precious uttering’s.  Whenever one of our girls said something that made us smile or giggle, we quickly wrote it down.  We always made an effort to do it right away, otherwise we’d forget to do it later.   We recorded the time our oldest daughter
Maddie told her younger and much smaller sister to pick on someone her own size.  Or the time she looked into the star filled sky and asked me to show her where the big and little “wrenches” were.   Now we love to pull out the notebook and read it as a family for a laugh.   We have all but memorized everything in the book by now, but they are memories that more than likely would have been long forgotten had we not captured them.   The entries are messy and brief, but never-the-less, they are there in permanent ink.  
My not yet carried out plan is to copy these entries and get them into their scrapbooks to accompany their personal summaries.    There
are those memories that we will never forget, and many, many more that will be forever forgotten.   I am grateful that we were able to catch some of those precious memories before time lets them slip away.  Below, are a few excerpts from our giggle book that are likely to produce a smile if not a chuckle:
  
March 2003 – Maddie, age 5, wanted to know what an earthquake is… given that we live in Nebraska and don’t experience them here. I told her that an earthquake causes the ground to shake around a little bit.  After a moment of thought, her reply to that was, “Do you go upside down?”
March 2006 – Dad was reading Sleeping Beauty to the girls one night and mixed up his fairytales.  Honestly confused, he paused his reading to comment, “I thought the seven dwarfs were in this book.”  At this, Emily, age 2, laughed and squeezed his arm with her little hand and said, “Daddy, you are so cute!” 
March 2007 –  Emily, age 3, asked this thought provoking question:  “If everyone in the whole world blew on Daddy’s finger at the same time, would it fall off? 
 
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