CHERISHING MEMORIES WITH TIMESPRING

I think as parents it's part and parcel to feel bittersweet as you watch your babies grow. I'm always so scared of missing moments that I'll never get back or forgetting the way their voice sounded at a certain age. Whilst there is so many key points that stand out from the past four years of motherhood for me, there are so many that don't too, it doesn't mean they weren't as important or valuable to me, but that's just how life works.



I'm quite a sentimental person, both of the boys have memory boxes that are crammed full of your more typical items, birthday cards from loved ones over the years, special items of clothing that I couldn't bare to part with such as their first outfits they wore. There's also the more unconventional pieces, with Patricks' including a lot of his nicu pieces, it's not that I always want to remember those dark days but it's a nice reflection to look back and see just how far he's come. There are some things that you can't parcel up and pop into a box though, those feelings and thoughts that run through your mind whilst you're up at four o'clock in the morning 'just to check' on them for the fifteenth time that night. Or the night before their birthday, reflecting on just how fast the past year has gone and knowing that the twelve months ahead will follow at a similar speed. For all those moments, the ones you can't grab hold of physically, there's TimeSpring.

I like to think of TimeSpring as an online memory box, we've all heard the age old trick of setting up an email address for your child and whizzing them emails with the intention of unlocking it for them on the eighteenth birthday, TimeSpring has covered that and then some with their unique app that indulges all the sentimental parents in the best way. Just last week I sat in the living room, decorated with banners and balloons, wrapping presents for my darling P, ready to turn two in just a few short hours and I felt so emotional that he was morphing from a baby to a toddler right before my eyes. I was going to start composing a post but I couldn't quite articulate myself enough to feel comfortable publishing it here, and that's why their app is perfect - those snippets of time when I just want to say something, a small few words, just for him. He can unlock it when he's eighteen, maybe when he finds out he's going to become a father himself, or perhaps even the night before his wedding? There are so many occasions when I can unlock the vault of our years together and let him look back and see exactly how I felt, or what we did, at such specific snapshots in time.

August and September will see a lot of input from me into my TimeSpring, Noah's due to begin school and the thought of it already sets my heart beating at the speed of light. He's my baby, my first and the boy who made me a mother, I'm anxious about sending him off into the big wide world of education, though I know he'll prosper at every point. I can't convey my nervousness to him though, of course Mummy has to be brave and smile through every welcome meeting whilst my stomach knots inside and whilst I can't quite offload onto his young shoulders just yet, I can log it on with a big stinking photograph of his first day at school and send it off to his section on my TimeSpring wheel. He might not understand Mummies reluctance to let him go at the grand old age of four, but perhaps when he's waving his own little ones off at the school gates he'll get it?

TimeSpring isn't just for children though, there are so many other ways you can use it and I've been exercising a few. Thinking about other family members, like my Nan, I know as morbid as it sounds she wont be around forever and she's such a vital role in both mine and the childrens' lives that I want to remember as much as we can. She spends her days telling me crazy tales of her childhood, recalling events from her own Mum and Grandma, with each one I'm noting them down in my TimeSpring and sending them to her, she's always said to me she should have wrote them in a book so we had them forever but her writing was never that good for her to feel confident enough to - now we don't have those worries, in a few taps of a keyboard they're locked in our online memory box.

For us TimeSpring will always be a part of our lives going forward, it seems complacent not to document as much as you can, from pictures and videos to simple thoughts and feelings - there isn't any limits on what you should share and there's something quite settling about that.

You can download the app for iphones here and via google play here.

*This is a post in collaboration with TimeSpring, as always all my views are entirely my own and honest. We love the app and thanks to them by boys will be inundated with everything we do over the next eighteen years.