A Digital Time Capsule :: Emailed Letters to My Children

I love going through my husband’s baby scrapbooks. Mimi, my mother-in-law, kept meticulous records of everything. Early in our journey as newlyweds, I would read through and get glimpses of what motherhood might be like. Or rather, motherhood to his children would be like. I wondered how alike our children would be to their father. For a year or so of his new life, he was referred to as Billie. Then somehow it changed to Willie when he was a toddler. Then he became Will about the time he graduated and got a “real” job.

Billie. Never quite took him for a Billie. But I digress.

It was interesting seeing him grow. And I compared his stats with my son Cole’s when he finally came along. Let’s just say his percentiles are more in the range of his Mama. Boo. But so are his eyelashes. So,… yay!

The baby book had sweet photos, and Billie-isms and snips, and snails and kitty cat tails in the oven….

what the,….

Billie wanted to bake the cat!??!?!

How creepy is that?

But Mimi assured me that he thought they could bake a cat like they bake turkeys and chickens and, well, you get the point.

Cole is now 7 years old and he is so much like his father. Perhaps not in height but in temperament. And character. Which is a good thing. But he loves for me to tell him about when he was little. He loves to see photos of his first day of school. He asks me to tell him the story of the day he came into this world. He likes to hear about when he would only wear jeans and only played with Hot Wheels cars.

And I have long wanted to capture my children’s memories and I have dabbled in scrapbooks and diaries and I have a box full of stuff they’ve done, but no pictures. I have a ton of photos, it’s just that they are on Facebook, or Instagram, or emails or texts.

I realized we live in a digital age and for me the simplest way to capture their memories was to write to them . And the easiest way to write to them was to email them. So I created an email account for each child so that when they turn 18, I am able to hand it over to them and they can open their Digital Time Capsule that is filled with emails from people who love them sharing stories and photos of their youth.

This email address is a super secret email address. We don’t give it to anyone at all so that it never gets filled with spam and junk. It’s an account only my husband and I and close family have the address to. We write them letters when we’re proud, when we’re happy, when life is good and when life is sad. We try in every letter we write to bring them back in time.

My hope is that my children will always know how much they were loved. And that they will always know how much they we’re thought of and considered in every little thing we do. From not letting them play in the yard because we have planted seeds for pretty grass to grow or how I worked very long hours the Spring of 2013 so that we can spend the Summer at the beach to the very reason we sold our very modern custom-built house to buy a very old house with lots and lots of stickers. I wanted Cole to know the reason he switched school 3 times before he was in 1st grade. I wanted him to know that even though the things we did as parents may not have made sense at the time, we did in his best interest. And more than anything, I wanted Cole to live by example. I want him to relive the love and respect his mom and dad have for each other. Because one day my son would become someone’s husband and someone’s father and I wanted him to have a constant reminder of what love is and what love does.

And truth be told, I wanted him to hear stories from his mom if anything ever happened to me.