There is little in this world more precious to me than my wife and my son. As such, I accumulate sentimental pieces of writing that pertain directly to them. These include things like notes, cards, letters, and so on.

With my son, there are a wide variety of sentimental pieces of writing. Take our baby book. It’s filled with cute worksheets and prompts, spaces for pictures and lines for little stories. It’s a pre-fab scrapbook, a collection of prompts for us to jot down observations which we can later return to as prompts for us to recall memories from a time during which we were getting very little sleep.

It’s a wonderful little piece of kitsch. It’s rewarding to look through even now mere months from some of our earliest entries. Sometimes we have to go back and correct ourselves (as we did with the sleeping entry) or we add on to our little stories as our son grows older (as we did with the bathtime entry because he transitioned from a infant tub to an inflatable tub to a fullsize tub).

We appreciate the ready-made-ness of the baby book, because though we both fancy ourselves fairly creative types, we often balk when confronted with an overly generalized task like “make a scrapbook celebrating your child’s early life.” OK, should we do this before or after hanging out with our son? And should we do this instead of sleeping or instead of eating?

I must admit, though that the ready-made-ness is consternating at times, because it’s insisting that we remember very specific types of things. Cute things. Fuzzy bunny things. No entry for “Baby’s First Fever” (this weekend, incidentally) or for “Baby’s First Time Biting the Cat.”

Couple that with the fact that there are a lot of other weird and interesting “firsts” regarding this, our first child. We are swimming with fun little materials, written and otherwise, that we want to hold on to, objects which are as good of prompts as any note we might leave ourselves. Things just as precious.

Plus, there are impermanent pieces of writing that remind us of other firsts, pieces of writing that we meant to act as short-term reminders, but which have slowly evolved into weird writings, liminal writings, halfway between temporary (by virtue of their media) and permanent (by virtue of our painstaking efforts to keep them going against all odds). Notes that we left ourselves on dry erase boards, but never erased even after they have jogged our memory and prompted us to “capture” the fact in our more permanent baby book.

So, in light of these competing types of writing, I was so inspired to compose a document that existed in a variety of different realms. Something permanent and impermanent. Something sentimental and clinical. A keepsake that looked back and projected forward.

**EDIT/EXPANSION BELOW**

I realized I was unintentionally vague about the writing that ended up creating. Here’s the skinny: I took a copy of my son’s birth certificate (weird, formal, institutional writing that we both want to hang on to and need to hang on to), and I wrote a bunch of different “First times” (prompted by our kitschy baby book) on it in pencil (prompted by those impermanent/permanent notes that we leave ourselves about our son’s firsts). Basically, I wanted to make a document that sort of embodied some of the strange, sentimental writings that we’ve collected since our son’s birth.

The process of writing all those “First time” prompts was at times sweet (“First ‘I Love You'”), at times heart wrenching (“First Major Illness”), but almost always controlled by my reflection on my own childhood. For example, my son will have a first GI Joe and Matchbox car and Barbie because we will buy him those things. They may be the only ones of these he ever has, but he will still have a first.

The weird institutional documents insist that we remember specific identifying things about our son (ourselves). Date/time of birth, name of mother, name of father, social security number, and so on. The Babybook insists that we remember other quirky, but cute identifying things about our son. First bath, first food, first time sleeping through the night. But we will remember firsts about our son, some idiosyncratic to us, some to our family.

Or maybe we won’t remember these things at all. Maybe they’ll be erased like a pencil mark or a dry erase board.