No less than four dozen times a day, my daughter will do something amazing. Maybe she’ll make up a little song about her baby sister in mommy’s belly, or line up all of her stuffed animals and read them a story, or, like she did the other day, wake up from her nap, still half-asleep and say “Big, big nose. Big beard. No, little beard. So fun, so cute. Daddy!”

I will think to myself, “Man, I’ve got to write that down.” Later that evening, when babe is finally in bed, and I have my 15 minutes to myself, I’ll try to remember what it was I needed to write down and, you guessed it, it’s gone.

The thing is, with wee ones, that moment could quite likely be gone forever. She’ll never say or do that thing again, and the onus is on me to preserve some fibers of what she was at any given time along this journey. It’s just, I’m so tired and stretched so thin as it is. Do I really need to be the archivist too?

Well, if not me,  then who? The truth is I am the only one who really sees her as she is right now, who has collected the accumulation of little moments just big enough to paint a picture of this magical little being. I am so lucky that I’ve gotten to see it all, but the pressure is heavy, too.

I think to myself, I’ll remember how she was, but then I have to admit that I’m already losing sight of her newborn self, that soon this little baby-toddler will slip into full toddler mode and then I will have lost more. I used to think scrapbooking was a strange and bizarre pasttime but now I see those women for who they are: nimble archivists of childhood. I need to do a better job of preserving this ephemeral little one– for her and for me.