This day I love.......: childhood

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My youngest daughter found a teddy at the back of my wardrobe. It was a black elephant. This raised a lot of questions from her about why I had this teddy. My Grandad won it for me at a school fayre when I was very little, around 6 I think. Seeing the elephant made me remember that night, having pie and peas and then him winning it for me.

Some of the items from the girls childhood I have also kept. They each have a special memory box where we keep things. Things they have won or created. The one thing we have a lot of, and I am not complaining, is artwork. The girls seem to create lots and come home with many from school. I came across a great way to preserve your kids’ childhoods from a fairly unlikely source, Geoffrey Ricardo, an Australian artist He came up with a charming way of printing the image of a soft toy onto craft paper. Click here to see how he does it.

As you can tell from my other posts on parenting, my blog is a way of capturing my precious moments as Mummy to my girls. I love to capture their moments not only online but off screen too. They capture their memories by drawing and my eldest writes stories. Thanks to the Internet, there’s now a cool way to preserve these masterpieces indefinitely. Etsy user Formiadesign runs a business where you can have your child’s drawings made into key rings. Although a bit pricey, they’ll be worth decades of smiles, and more unique than a lot of other mementos.

With the blog I also take lots of photos of the girls and whilst I store them to look at on the computer, nothing quite beats holding a photo and looking at it away from the computer screen. Keeping all those photos together and safe can sometimes be difficult, but there are some lovely handmade photo albums to be found online. When you have one of these, your irreplaceable pictures will be stored in a unique and aesthetically beautiful way.

As my children grow up I seem to find myself looking more at the things in the memory box and reading more posts on the blog. Trying to remember all those little things. I cannot believe we will soon be welcoming another addition to our family and creating even more precious moments.

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I have family all over the world and also all over the UK. Family is very important to me and I would love to see more of them and they want to see more of the girls growing up. This often involves lengthy emails with pictures attached or pictures shared on other social networking platforms. I am careful however about the pictures I place on these and its not the same as having an album to store all our pictures and videos of the girls as they grow up that family and close friends can view.

23Snaps is a private social networking tool which lets you capture, cherish and share the special moments in your child's life. I was particularly excited to use this as, as previously mentioned, it would be great to share our photos and videos with our widely spread family.

The application is free to download which is a great bonus and currently available for iPhone and iPad with the Android app due for release next week. There is also the online web version which is again free to use.

One of the features that I particularly like is that you create each of your children their own page. On this page you can look at photos or videos, which are displayed in pin style, in chronological order. You are able to enter a text update, so for example when they take their first steps or their first tooth can be recorded. The thing I really like within this is the function to enter a measurement such as height or weight. I'm often asked how much did she weigh when she was 6 months and now I can find out.

The app is smart enough to work out each child's age to month and day and so when a photo is entered it displays this data along with the date on each picture. You are therefore able to create for each of your own children a personalised story of their childhood. Family and close friends can comment on your pictures enabling a sense of 'being there' even when far away.

This functionality alone is brilliant; my family can see at a glance all the key milestones of my children's development and see how they are growing. There is no more guessing how old was she at Christmas, at what age did she take her first step, its all there for us to see at a glance.

I found the application very easy to navigate through and easy to use. There is a news feed which shows as it would suggest a collection of what has happened, again in chronological order. It was great to see the removal of duplication as I could enter my husband and the application records him as my partner, enabling us both to edit our children's pages. You also have the option of viewing the news feed in calender mode, so if like me you have taken a picture of your children almost every day, you can see throughout the month how they have changed.

I absolutely love this application my family have already started using it and there is not much more I can say about it other than to try it yourself, its free and its a fantastic way to cherish those moments that go all too quickly.

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