Baby Memory Book

A baby is on the way, or has just arrived. You ask the people around the new parents to each write a letter. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, old friends, the couple who introduced the parents in the first place. Some write to the parents: welcome to this, hang on, it gets easier. Some write straight to the baby, a person they haven't met yet and who can't read a word.

We collect all of these letters and print them into a hardcover book. The new parents read it during those first foggy months, usually at two in the morning with a baby on one shoulder. But the book is really for the child. It's a record of everyone who was happy they were born, written before the child was old enough to know any of these people, kept for the day they can read it themselves.

We've been making these books since 2009, and they get opened twice. The first time, an exhausted parent cries over the kitchen table. The second time, sometimes eighteen years later, a young adult reads a letter from a grandparent who is no longer around to send one.

New parents get a lot of onesies. The onesies are outgrown in a month and the parents barely remember who gave what. A book of letters is the rare new-baby gift that doesn't have a shelf life. It's worth more the longer it sits around.

Part of what makes it work is that you can write to a person who isn't here yet, or who can't understand you yet, and say things you'd never say to their face. People write down what the baby's mother was like as a teenager. They write what they hope this kid turns out to be, knowing the kid will eventually read it and judge how it went. A grandparent writes the family stories that usually get lost when the people who lived them are gone.

The timing is the whole point. These letters can only be honest if they're written now, before anyone knows who this child becomes. You're putting them somewhere safe so a grown person can open them years from now and find out, in their own family's handwriting, exactly how much they were wanted.

There are a few good moments to start one of these, depending on who's organizing it and when:

• At a baby shower, instead of having guests sign a line in a notebook, you ask each of them to write a real letter to the baby or to the parents. You go home with something the family actually keeps.
• A book for a new niece or nephew, with the aunts, uncles, and grandparents on one side of the family writing to a child they're meeting for the first time. The kid grows up knowing the whole crew was there from day one.
• A partner organizing it for a new mother, asking her closest people to write to her about the kind of mom they already know she'll be. She reads it in the hardest weeks, when she needs it most.
• A book meant to stay sealed until a milestone. Letters written now to be read at the child's 18th birthday, full of advice, predictions, and hopes from people who may or may not still be around to give them in person.
• A book that follows a pregnancy, started while everyone's waiting, so the child can someday read what the months before they arrived actually felt like for the people expecting them.

Writing to a baby feels odd at first. The baby can't read, can't remember you, and won't see this for years. People get stuck on that and write something stiff like "Welcome to the world, little one." It's sweet, and the kid will skim right past it.

Try writing to the adult this baby will become. Tell them about their parents before they were parents. Tell them a family story they'll need to know and might never hear otherwise. Say what you hope for them, and be specific enough that it's clearly yours. If you're writing to the new parents instead, tell them the truth: that the first months are hard, that they're doing better than they think, that you remember.

It doesn't have to be long. Add a photo if you have one that fits, a picture of the parents young, or of the place this child is being born into. The letters that land hardest are the ones a reader can tell were written by someone who actually thought about them, years before they were anyone at all.

You set up a book on our site and pick a deadline. Then you invite people to contribute by sending them a link where they can write their letter and upload photos. You can see who's been invited and who's submitted, which helps when it's time to send reminders. (Everyone means to write the letter. New babies and tired schedules being what they are, almost nobody does it on time.)

Once the letters are in, you can personalize the book: choose a cover photo, write the title, arrange the letters in the order you want. We design, print, and ship a hardcover or paperback book to you or straight to the parents.

Plan for about 20 days from order to delivery. If you're collecting letters around a due date, start early, because the weeks right after a baby arrives are not when anyone has time to write. And if you're making one to be opened years from now, it can sit on a shelf until then, waiting for the one person it was really written for.