Motherhood Monday: The One Thing You Should Do Before You Head to the Hospital

The week before I had Mia (read: the week I was past my due date and NOT happy about it haha ;) I read a bunch of articles on preparing for baby and what to do in the hospital and other people's birth stories. Mainly in the hope that I would catch something my body was doing and realize it was actually going into labor.

While most of what I read was decidedly not helpful, one thing really stuck, and it wasn't really baby advice. It was, before you leave for the hospital, download the 1 Second Everyday app. I'd heard of it before - it's basically an app where you take one second of video every day for a year, and then can watch all of your memories back in one video.

We started taking videos on day one in the hospital, and have managed to fill in something every day since. The app is really easy to use. You pick what day you want to start (it can be any day in the past - or today!) and it automatically pulls up videos you took that day. You choose a video and where to cut the one second clip. Then whenever you want, you can have the app mash all of the clips together to make the combined video!

I've been watching it back at least once a week since she was born, and it's so sweet to see her as that tiny little newborn and then slowly get bigger and learn to do new things. I've got clips of her first bath, her first time rolling over, and her first food in there. We've also tried to get other people in the video, so you can see her with her grandparents and great-grandparents and cousins and friends. We're only at six months right now, and I'm so excited to see how she's changed by the one year mark!

There have been a few days we've missed along the way, because hey, we've got a baby! But the app will let you put in a "live" iPhone photo which sort of looks like a video clip when the video all mixed together. What I've been doing instead is cheating a little. If I miss a day, I'll pick one of the extra videos I took the day before or the day after and pop that in instead! The app will let you go into all of your videos and arranges them by day so you can easily find what you're looking for. Or, you know, if you aren't into cheating, you could just skip that day in the video. The days fly by so fast you would never notice.

Follow along with everything Kristina does via Bloglovin!