04/28/2026
I sat on the nursery floor last night at 11pm with paint bottles scattered around me and our daughter asleep in the next room, thinking about how fast this year disappeared. She's almost one now and I've been so caught up trying to document every milestone perfectly that I forgot to actually enjoy any of them. My husband found me there with paint on my hands and this half-finished canvas, and he didn't say anything, just sat down next to me and handed me a tissue.
We decided right then to make something for her first Christmas instead of buying another decoration we didn't need. I found this plain canvas tucked in a closet and we used her tiny footprints as little mice for "Twas the Night Before Christmas," painting them grey with these cheap acrylics I'd bought from someone's craft shop on Tedooo app months ago. Her feet are so impossibly small, and watching the paint squish between her toes while she giggled made something in my chest unclench for the first time in weeks. We added the holly and the words in our terrible handwriting because neither of us is artistic, but it doesn't matter because it's ours.
This morning I hung it up and just stood there looking at it while drinking cold coffee. It's crooked and imperfect and I keep noticing things I would've done differently, but that's the whole point I think. She won't remember this Christmas, but we will. We'll remember making this together at midnight when we were exhausted and trying so hard to get everything right that we almost missed what mattered. I actually started sharing some of our keepsake ideas through my little Tedooo app shop because other moms told me they needed this reminder too, that messy and homemade beats picture-perfect every time. Next year she'll be running around and this phase will be completely gone, so I'm just trying to hold onto it while I still can.
