My son is two and a half. I have thousands of photographs of him on my phone, organised into albums by month, backed up to the cloud, and largely indistinguishable from each other because photographs of babies, however beloved, tend to look similar. What I don't have — or didn't have, before the Guess How Much I Love You Record Book — was a record of the things that photographs don't capture. The weight of him at six weeks. The first word. The thing he was afraid of at eight months that he'd completely forgotten by twelve. The world events that were happening while he was learning to sit up. The Record Book holds all of that, and it has become the most treasured object in our home.
What Photographs Don't Capture
I want to explain this because I think it's the thing that makes a record book genuinely valuable rather than just a nice idea. A photograph captures an image. It doesn't capture the context — what was happening that day, what he'd just learned to do, what we were thinking and feeling, what the world looked like outside the frame. Memory fills in some of that context, but memory is unreliable and selective, and the early months of a baby's life are experienced in a state of sleep deprivation that makes reliable memory formation difficult.
I started filling in the Record Book when my son was about three weeks old, writing down things I was certain I'd remember and have since completely forgotten. His birth weight I remember. The exact sound of his first laugh I don't, but I wrote it down. The first time he recognised my face I remember. The first time he reached for a toy I don't, but I wrote it down. The book is full of things I would have lost.
Finding the Book
I found the Guess How Much I Love You Record Book in the Baby & Toddler collection on ALTOE. The Guess How Much I Love You illustrations were the detail that made me choose this over other record books — the Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram artwork is genuinely beautiful, and having it as the backdrop for my son's first two years felt right in a way that a generic baby record book didn't. The structure of the book — starting before birth and running through to age two — was exactly the scope I wanted.
The range of what it captures was the practical detail that convinced me. Not just firsts — first smile, first word, first steps — but favourites, personal details, world events, space for photographs, footprints, and memorabilia. It's a comprehensive record rather than a highlights reel, which is what makes it genuinely useful as a keepsake rather than just a pretty object.
Filling It In
I want to be honest about the process, because I think people sometimes feel guilty about not filling in baby books perfectly. I didn't fill this in every day. Some sections I completed weeks after the event, working from memory and from the photographs on my phone. Some sections I filled in during night feeds, writing in the dark with a pen I'd left on the bedside table for exactly that purpose. The book is not perfectly filled in. It's honestly filled in, which is better.
The structure of the pages makes it easy to fill in even when you're exhausted. The prompts are specific enough to guide you — you're not staring at a blank page wondering what to write — but open enough to allow you to write what's actually true rather than what you think you should write. I've written things in this book that I've never told anyone else, because the prompts invited honesty and the context felt right.
What It Means Now
My son is two and a half. The book covers birth to age two, so it's complete. I read it back for the first time last month, sitting on the sofa while he was asleep, and I cried for about twenty minutes. Not from sadness — from the specific emotion of being returned to moments I'd half-forgotten, of reading my own handwriting from three weeks after his birth when I was exhausted and overwhelmed and completely in love, of seeing his footprint from the hospital next to a photograph from his second birthday.
The book is the most accurate record of the first two years of my son's life that exists. More accurate than the photographs, because it captures what the photographs were taken in the middle of. I'm going to give it to him when he's old enough to understand it, and I think it will matter to him in a way that a phone full of photographs wouldn't.
As a Gift
I've bought this as a baby shower gift three times since I got my own. It's the gift I give when I want to give something that will still matter in twenty years. The Guess How Much I Love You illustrations make it beautiful enough to display; the structure makes it useful enough to actually fill in; the scope makes it comprehensive enough to be genuinely valuable as a record. It's the gift that requires something from the recipient — time, attention, honesty — and gives back something irreplaceable.
My Recommendation
If you're expecting a baby, or if someone you love is, the Guess How Much I Love You Record Book is the keepsake to buy. Start filling it in before the baby arrives — the book begins there, and those pre-birth pages are ones you'll be glad you completed. Don't worry about filling it in perfectly. Fill it in honestly.
You'll find it in the Baby & Toddler collection on ALTOE. Buy it early. Start writing. You'll be glad you did.
— Hannah Cartwright, secondary school librarian, mother of one two-and-a-half-year-old, and person who cried for twenty minutes reading a book she wrote herself, Norwich
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