Starting a Blog for Your Baby

As a new parent, it’s not always easy to find time to record a baby’s early life in their baby book.  Create a blog for your baby to help you to complete the missing information in their baby book later and give them an interactive window into their early childhood as an adult.

Choose a blogging website and sign up for a free membership.  There are many blogs to choose from.  Find a blog that is easy to use and one with enough features to suite your tastes.  Consider making the blog private and only sharing it with your spouse.  Keep the whole project a secret from your child until they are much older.  It will be a sweet and unexpected surprise for your son or daughter to receive access to so much information about their childhood.  Verify that you are able to download backups of the blog to your computer and do so frequently.

Take lots of digital photographs of your baby.  A mobile phone with a built-in camera is extremely handy for this.  Remember that pictures taken with a camera phone will typically be low resolution and perfect for displaying on the blog, but will not make good printed photographs.  If you wish to print many of the pictures that you take of your baby, buy a decent digital camera and keep it close by at all times.  If you take mostly high resolution photos of your baby, use a photo editing program to make lower resolution copies to post to the blog because they will take up far less space and load faster in your web browser.

Post interesting and detailed blog entries every day.  Write as though you are speaking to your child directly.  Don’t write, “Ate applesauce for the first time today.”  Make the post interesting and discuss things that were happening, not just with your child, but also with family members and friends whom they will be able to relate to later in life.  Don’t share any negative or personal feelings about anyone and don’t talk about your problems or worries.  Keep the experience positive and upbeat.  You can also add brief clips of current events, but remember not to just link to other web sites.  Most websites change constantly, so you’ll want to make snapshots of pages or find files that you can save on the blog or link to.  PDF files are a great format to use for capturing pictures and text in a single document because they display the same way, no matter which browser you use to view the file.

Upload short, compressed video files or sound clips to the blog.  This will require additional equipment, like a digital video camera and the appropriate editing software, but the results are well-worth the investment.  Your child will one day have the ability to watch their first steps or hear their first words by simply logging into the blog, which will be far more interactive than their baby book could ever be.