How many people recall having family photo albums when growing up? They were big heavy binders with cellophane sleeved pages to insert pictures. I can remember sitting on the couch with a heavy photo album resting on my legs; hearing the crinkly sounds as I turned the pages. Some of the pictures were of relatives long since gone that I never met, some of the pictures were of my parents before I was born, then there were the pictures of a first birthday, first Halloween and Christmas… and every other holiday in between. It was a photo journal of life; a concept that seems to have gone by the wayside like the 8-track tape and VHS videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now with cellphones and social media, the act of printing pictures is a rare occurrence. We take countless numbers of pictures with our cellphones and maybe share a handful of them, the rest remain on our phones until we delete them because we run low on storage space or we transfer them to a cloud account and forget about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of the pictures I had taken of my daughters, of our trips together, and of general life experiences… I didn’t want collecting digital dust. I wanted to create a way to record and share these snap-shots in time with my daughters. I knew social media wasn’t the solution, I wanted something more personal. I wanted something that would allow me to share experiences with both of them. I realized if I created each of them an email account I could journal experiences, attach pictures and send it to them both or individually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I created each of my daughters an email account over ten years ago. To this day I have not told them about the accounts and for over ten years I have been sending them emails and attaching pictures. The emails I’ve sent are not just about our family trips or the holidays; this has been an excellent mechanism for me to share fatherly advice and pass along life lessons for when they are older. It has been sort of like a diary between me and my daughters. It hasn’t been a journal of just the happy times, but also of the times when I might have been upset with them, or when I might have upset one of them. When those occasions have happened not only have I apologized to them, but I’ve been able to write to them about it from the perspective of being a parent and hoping it helps them one day should they too become parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not sure when I will tell my daughters about their email accounts and give them their logon information but I hope it brings back fond memories of our experiences together, causes them to reflect on challenging points in their lives and how they became stronger as a result, and gives them advise so they might avoid making some of the decisions I made in life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How many people recall having family photo albums when growing up? They were big heavy binders with cellophane sleeved pages to insert pictures. I can remember sitting on the couch with a heavy photo album resting on my legs; hearing the crinkly sounds as I turned the pages. Some of the pictures were of relatives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[32,41,60,66],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parenting","tag-digital-journal","tag-family","tag-life","tag-memories"],"yoast_head":"\r\n