Great idea! Ive been toying w something like this and came to similar conclusions over a website or a blog, so I found your email idea great.
Also, do you or other HN people have any recommendations on sites or forums to talk about this kind of things?
My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
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Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#12Your second kid's going to resent kid #1 for his entire life.
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#13Your second kid's going to resent kid #1 for his entire life .
We will of course do this for the second kid :-). I think this will turn out to be not too much of a burden. I am sending a dozen medium-sized emails everyday already, what is a couple more for my children.
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#14It's a great idea. I might just try it myself. My dad is turning 63 and I wish I still had with him the kind of bond I have now with my 4 year old son. I'd try anything to keep the relationship strong. The skeptic in me wonder though how sustainable it is. Credentials can be lost, accounts can be wiped out, or you may just stop contributing after a while. A service such as one you described would be essential to supp…
Yes, a dedicated service would be great.
For now, I hope Gmail would be reliable enough for our purposes. We stored the passwords to the account, and we plan to visit the account every couple of days (If not for keeping a tab on the account, I would do this just to learn what my wife has been writing to my son ;-)
It would be nice to have a script that occasionally downloads the emails and make them into a big pdf file.
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#15Great idea! Ive been toying w something like this and came to similar conclusions over a website or a blog, so I found your email idea great. Also, do you or other HN people have any recommendations on sites or forums to talk about this kind of things?
I found this forum for suggesting features to Gmail people.
http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-suggest-a-labs-fea...
Maybe if Gmail people hear about this application, they might provide more support for the "generational delivery" as fnazeeri puts it.
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#16It's a great idea. I might just try it myself. My dad is turning 63 and I wish I still had with him the kind of bond I have now with my 4 year old son. I'd try anything to keep the relationship strong. The skeptic in me wonder though how sustainable it is. Credentials can be lost, accounts can be wiped out, or you may just stop contributing after a while. A service such as one you described would be essential to supp…
Yes, a dedicated service would be great. For now, I hope Gmail would be reliable enough for our purposes. We stored the passwords to the account, and we plan to visit the account every couple of days (If not for keeping a tab on the account, I would do this just to learn what my wife has been writing to my son ;-) It would be nice to have a script that occasionally downloads the emails and make them into a big pdf fi…
This would be a great premium service for Ancestry.com.
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, a dedicated service would be great. For now, I hope Gmail would be reliable enough for our purposes. We stored the passwords to the account, and we plan to visit the account every couple of days (If not for keeping a tab on the account, I would do this just to learn what my wife has been writing to my son ;-) It would be nice to have a script that occasionally downloads the emails and make them into a big pdf fi…
This would be a great premium service for Ancestry.com.
That is a great idea. I think they should be interested in providing something like this.
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#18My first reaction was also: "He's never going to read all those e-mails." But after reading some of the comments and giving it some thought, I'm realizing this may be a pretty good idea. I'm not sure I'd have the discipline to write an e-mail every day, and he's already 1.5 years old, but at least once a week might go a long way.
Not only that, but say you make it a habit and it lasts for more than the 5 years. Yes, it might sound stupid to send e-mails to your own son when he's in the same house every day where you can just talk. But if you keep the habit and it's time for him to leave the house (goes to college, gets married, etc.), you will have that ongoing communication---and that will be priceless.
My dad is a pretty smart guy, but I feel I've made a lot of mistakes that I could have learned from him if we had just talked about stuff. I don't want that to happen with my son. It would be awesome to teach him everything I've learned from/about life.
Anyway, now I'm deciding if I should send him e-mails to a Gmail account or keeping this in Emacs Org-Mode. I've never used Org-Mode, but it looks like it has some good features that would help keeping entries well-organized and easy to retrieve, e.g.:
Tags: http://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html#Tags Publishing: http://orgmode.org/manual/Publishing.html#Publishing
Thanks for sharing your idea!
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#19Your second kid's going to resent kid #1 for his entire life .
We will of course do this for the second kid :-). I think this will turn out to be not too much of a burden. I am sending a dozen medium-sized emails everyday already, what is a couple more for my children.
I say that as an eldest son with two siblings who still give me crap years later because my parents invested more time in "parenting stuff" with me than they did with either of them.
Re: My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
#20I dunno if its worth the effort. It'll probably end up like all of photo albums people keep. Opened once when they are presented to the kid, and then thrown in the closet, never to be opened again.
If you overwhelm him with too much information he is less likely to read them. I doubt he'll care that much about the minute details of your life.
Its a good idea to track the stuff, but I would stick only to big occasions. Think of it as your typical baby book....you might go back to find out what your first word was, or what height you were at age 6, but noone goes back to find out what their 278th word was?