Keeping Your Precious Memories Alive
Starting a family is one of the most special, exciting, and daunting times in all of our lives. If you are lucky enough to be given the precious gift of parenthood, then you are at the start of a journey that will fill your future with precious memories for the rest of your life.
Children develop so quickly, especially when they are newborns, and it can be hard to keep up with them. One day they are speaking their first words, or have a special toy that they make up pretend voices for. In just a flash, their voices are breaking, or they are spending all their time in their bedrooms or with friends. Time flashes past, but luckily, we live in a digital era where we can capture all the special moments and keep them with us for decades to come.
When your baby is born, one of the best ways to capture the beauty of your new family is through newborn portraits. Although there are lots of photos taken at home, having a professional selection of images of your baby and your family, will last you a lifetime. Photographers can really capture the love and innocence of newborns. There are many options, you don’t have to pay a lot for these, and you can take options where you have digital copies which you later decide to have printed onto canvas or mounted into large frames. Newborn portraits are a great gift for grandparents and other family members.
Another great way of tracking your baby’s growth and keeping a part of them with you through the years, no matter how big they get, is through footprint or hand casting. This is something you can do at home and is relatively simple to achieve. There are no harmful elements so you don’t need to worry about your baby coming into contact with something that could make them ill. You could even use child handprints in pottery or plate design.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to do a casting, why not use paint and a white plate. Then make a handprint on the plate and use a varnish to protect it for a lifetime. If you do this every year, you will have a set of dinner plates for your child to have when they leave home! And lasting memories for a lifetime.
Using our smartphones to capture precious moments is something many of us do daily. But you may find that you are using a lot of space in your storage. It is also easy to lose videos if you aren’t backing them up or storing them somewhere. Digital media has bought a decline in photo albums like our grandparents used to have so you should have a yearly ritual where you pick the best of your images and get them printed. You should also get a simple editing app and create an annual ‘best of’ from your video footage.
Storing the images in year-dated files is excellent, use cloud storage to ensure you have space on your computer and to protect the photos that you have if your phone is lost or stolen. However, you ought to download them onto a device like a hard drive or USB stick so that they can be viewed by everyone down the generations. Keep an eye on changes to technology so that you can swap the files over if something looks like it will be hard to use. For example, videos on the old VHS system are hard to watch in our homes where many of us use DVD or streaming. Transfer things regularly and make sure you are up to date.