You know that nagging feeling you get when you’ve forgotten something? And you’re pretty sure it’s something big, but you just can’t quite remember? And pretty soon you start thinking about it every day, wondering if the thing you forgot is super serious and the FBI is going to swing by your house one day?
No? Just me with the FBI thing? OK. Good to know.
Anyway, I’ve been wandering around the South Valley doing all the normal things I do when suddenly in the soup aisle at Nob Hill I realized what I had forgotten. No, not condensed cream of mushroom, although that was on the shopping list. What I had forgotten was so awful, so horrible, it defied all the laws of motherhood. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I must.
I never finished Junior’s baby book. OK, fine. To be truthful, I hadn’t actually started it. Now, I have a baby book, if only because at every baby shower ever, about five people give the mom-to-be a baby book. I also have pictures. Sadly, given my son’s advanced age of 19, those priceless moments are still wound up in little canisters on something we used in the olden days called “film.”
Film had to be taken to stores to be developed. That means that lazy moms like me, who found their days filled with the joys of potty training, projectile vomiting (from the kid, not me) and teachable moments involving not eating dog food, never got the film developed. That is because we would have had to change out of the crud-stained sweats, maybe slap on some makeup and oh, take the kid out in public where people would be repulsed by his baby food stained face and hair.
And by the time your child outgrew baby food (or at least learned not to run it through their hair while eating), you forgot about the 72 canisters in a basket in the guest room closet. So the film never got developed. Fortunately for me, my mom is an organized she-devil who never wore crud-stained sweats, so she took lots of pictures and developed them. Unfortunately for me, I am not an organized she-devil and I have no clue where I put her pictures.
Even more unfortunate for me, the baby books have room for more than mere photos. They have a page for locks of baby hair. I do not have any of Junior’s hair. Quite honestly, he had issues with haircuts when he was little (and if you’ve seen him recently, apparently still does).
So I avoided haircuts and just periodically ran a home hair cut shaver over his wee little head and called it a day. (Sadly, this usually still happens.)
But I’m not going to let a lack of pictures or baby hair stop me. Now that I have remembered I forgot to do the baby book, I am going to do the baby book. And hopefully, in a few years, the baby book will be done. Or not. Yeah. Probably not.
