Dad tip #16: Record the cooing

The cliché that we've found most true is that "babies grow up so fast". We're just five months into our journey as parents and our son is noticeably different every week in the way he looks, moves, and sounds.

One recommendation my sister gave me was to make sure that we video recorded our son's early cooing noises. Because babies develop so quickly, that ultra-cute, tentative, and quiet cooing rapidly turns into still-cute, but loud cooing with occasional shrieking tossed in for good measure. You still love every noise he makes, but the new noises aren't quite as melt-your-heart-y.

If you don't have a video recorder of some kind, I suspect your digital camera or even your phone have the ability to record limited video. I think the important thing is just to get some record of that cooing regardless of the quality, just so you can look back on it some day. We used our Nikon Coolpix 7900 digital camera. The camera is several years old now, but is a great point-and-shoot that allows us to take as much video as there is space left on the SD memory card.

I suspect we'll eventually upgrade to some HD digital video recorder at some point. But I figure upgrading can wait until our boy has a recital, performance, or sporting event of some kind that we'll want to record in its entirety.

Those hi-def camcorders are still pretty expensive, but I figure in four or five years, they'll be half the size and half the cost. As a random side note, I wonder if George Lucas went back and made Special Editions of his kids' early cooing videos.