August 05, 2013

Documenting Your Child’s World

We came across this amazing video today called “A Second a Day from Birth” made by a man named Sam Cornwell and his wife, which documents their son every day from his birth for an entire year. It’s so special to see them watch their child develop and grow. The love and sentimentality behind the project is truly touching.

It made us think about adopted children and how often the documentation of their history is stunted. They don’t always have the benefit of access to long lines of family lineage, photos of their parents when they were young, or depending on how old they were when they were adopted, even photos or video of themselves as children. Because these are the things that help to create a history, it made us reflect on how important it is to ensure that we are able to give that to our children. Photos of their life, videos of their activities and a timeline of their world – which is, really, all symbolic of of our love and support for them and the days they are living.

It’s easy in the tech age to document all sorts of things, but what we are missing is the act of putting that documentation into the play. Printing and collecting the photos we keep, watching the videos we take, displaying the images we produce and chronicling them in a way that isn’t just storing them on a hard drive, but actually referencing them and showing them to our children and confirming for them that their existence has been so special we couldn’t help but to keep every possible memento along the way.

Not that we all need to live in the past. But as adoptive parents it is our responsibility to give our children a past. Because, quite simply, theirs begins with us.