Tuesday's Tip-Email for your kids

I can't take credit for this week's Tuesday's Tip. It was all my husband's idea, and it's a great one, if I do say so myself.

Shortly after Sydney was born, Brian decided to create email addresses for them. I'm sure you are wondering why a newborn baby and a 19 month old would need email addresses. That's a good question. He had the idea of sending a quick email to the girl's accounts everytime they did something cute or said something funny that he would want to remember. I wasn't blogging at the time either, so I didn't have a very good way of writing things down and after 2 kids in 19 months, my memory was shot.

All of our family members have the girls email addresses and that way if they have a story they want to share with the girls, they can email it directly to them. I will give you an example of a story that happened just this morning.

I had to take Sydney to the doctor today. She's been having some tummy issues and thankfully we figured out what was going on and how to fix it. Anyway, my dad took Brooklyn to run some errands with him so she wouldn't have to go to the Dr with me and expose herself to all the germs. (Sidenote: Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that when you take your child in for their well care exam they end up coming down with a cold, just a few days later)? I called my dad afterward to update him on Sydney and he proceeded to share this story with me. Here is the email that my dad sent to Brooklyn's email address:

As Brooklyn and I [Papa] were driving through town we passed by "Moe's." ("Welcome to Moe's.") Brooklyn began talking about chicken nuggets and how much she liked them.
She made up a story about how the nuggets were playing in her stomach, tickling her.
I said, "Why not drink some water and maybe they will stop." She said, "The water won't bother them because they have umbrellas." Well, I said, "Drink a whole bunch of water so they feel like they are in a flood and they will have to stop tickling you."
Brooklyn followed up with, "They will get in the umbrellas like being in a boat and float."

How many 5 yr. old kids would think of turning the umbrella over to make a boat?

Love you Brooklyn!
Papa

Having these email accounts for the girls also enables grandparents to sit down and write to them anytime they want. Let's face it, gone are the days of hand written notes and snail mail. We just don't take the time to do that anymore, but we all have access to a computer and it takes no time to write a paragraph or two from anywhere in the world.

The great thing is that email accounts are free and quick to set up. We decided to make them creative and hard to guess so that they wouldn't get any spam or any other unwanted emails. If your kids are older and already have an email address, maybe you create a second email just for these types of stories. How cool would that be to hand them a notebook of emails on their graduation day from college or the day they get married? How fun would it be for your child to be able to read stories to their children about the things they did when they were little? I know Sydney is always asking me to tell her stories of when I was a little girl and I have about the same 5 I always tell her.

So what are you waiting for? You know your brain is already going 100 miles an hour trying to remember all the funny things your kids have said just in the last week. So get your children an email address and stay tuned for a cool giveaway I will be doing. You won't want to miss it.