I like forgetful.ca

In the past few months, I haven’t been paying as much attention to forgetful.ca as I’d like to.  But like an old friend, I’m happy that when I do come around again, the blog is happy to welcome me back.  With open arms.  My very own Giving Tree.

A few times in the last couple of weeks, I questioned the date that something happened in our lives, or wanted to quickly pull up a photo of Jaia or Dan and I immediately went to the blog and did a search.  And there it was.  Exactly what I was looking for.  A search engine for all things Fullerton.  It helps that we’ve been writing our memoirs – blog-style – since December 2005 and have posted over 600 times.  In the last few years, the easy majority goes to posts about jaia, before and after her birth, but almost everything over the past three years has been documented.  It’s like a diary…without the whole privacy thing getting in the way.  

And I’ve really enjoyed my recent trips down Memory Lane.  How great would it be to preserve everything written on forgetful.ca?  Anniversary messages, birth announcements, daily photos of my daughter.  And then I found it.  A website geared towards wanna-be writers that allows you upload your blog and publish it in book format.  A real book.  Hardcover and pretty.  And then, if you think anyone else might care, they can actually buy a copy for themselves.  (No, not holding out hope).

I had planned to do this for Jaia’s first birthday.  A year of Photos of the Day that she could look back on.  But I never found enough time.  Our blog changed formats part of the way throught that year and Blurb.com did not accept the old format and that meant finding and re-uploading all the photos in order to have the book be complete.  Not an easy task and it turns out that I’d much rather hang out with Jaia than hunt for pictures of her.  And that task fell off the to-do list as other things piled up.

But I still want to do it.  I actually think I’ll make it more of a yearly project where in January I order a book containing all the posts from the year before.  That way Jaia still has access to the things we wrote and the wonderful things her friends and family have commented since before she was born, all wrapped up in a pretty, actually-hold-it-in-your-hands package. 

My friend Sylvie, along with her husband – both accomplished photographers – don’t have a public blog, but do have an adorable wee one of their own (just a few weeks younger than Jaia), published a stack of Blurb.com photo books for their family for Christmas last year.  The quality was phenomenal and the books were beautiful.  Everyone loved them.  And since I’ve actually held one in my hand and flipped through it, all sense of worry about producing our own vanished.  I can’t wait to see how our version turns out.