Where I am

I have decided to challenge myself. My daughter, my first baby, turned 8 yesterday. That was a pretty big day for her, and I realized it was a pretty big day for me as well. When I look at my pictures and my scrapbooks, it is all about the kids. Of course it is, I just adore them! The creating is for me, but the finished project is for them. I am recording their lives so they can look back and remember, but what will it tell them about their mom? Well, certainly, it will tell them how nuts she is.... all this over paper and stickers and glitter....? I want them to know more about me. Sometimes I wonder what my mom was like at my age. Sure, I can ask her, but what she tells me is her memory and recollections. I want to record a little bit of me in the now so that when the girls are older, they can look back and know what I was like when they were too little to see their mom as any thing more than the giver of cookies. Maybe, when I am older, and all grown up myself, I can also look back and think about how far I have come. It is already kind of hard to remember what it was like being the mom of a brand new little baby 8 years ago.... Who I was then, what kind of little every day things did I do, what made me laugh, how did things make me feel. That was only 8 years ago, for goodness sake, what is going to happen in another 10... 20...30?

So, here is my challenge to myself. Each day I am going to post one picture. Just one. It could be a person, a place, a thing. Ok, a picture of a noun :o) and I am going to tell you why that picture is important to me. I am going to this every day between today, the day after Erin's birthday, until the day before Haley's birthday. That is going to be 32 days. 32 pictures. All recorded here. Hopefully each picture will tell a little about me right now. What makes me happy, why I laugh, the kinds of things that make me crazy, and what I think is important. When I am all done, I will have a collection of pictures and thoughts to make a great scrapbook about myself. It sounds a little vain at first, I know. Look at it this way; What would you give to have something like this about your mom or dad? About your grandparent? About anyone in your family that was recorded when they were younger? Yeah, it is a journal about me, but it certainly isn't for me.

So..... Today's Picture is the cake I made for Erin's birthday. Why is this important? It has nothing to do with the cake itself. It has to do with the fact that I made it. I always make the girls a birthday cake. I don't know why, but I feel like it is important to make their cake. I am not the super-baking mom. I don't make home made cookies, only the stuff from the tube, brownies from a box, everything else from the bakery. When it comes to birthdays, I just have to make them a cake. Birthdays are special. My girls are special. Just one little way that I show them how much I love them. I don't think they realize how much of me goes into these cakes, I think they are too young to se that now. Someday, when they are all grown up and have their own kids though, I hope they tell them how their mom always made them a homemade cake for their birthday. I hope that it is one of those "Awww" moments for them when they are all grown up.