is it weird to set up an email address for a future child and sends thoughts/antics etc even when we are childless right now / before we are pregnant/

[Coziefox]

I'm married and we both want kids in the future. Right now it's not financially viable for us to have a kid and also our current house Is definitely not child friendly because of the size and layout etc.

I'm also a child care nursery nurse, looking after babies and I get so broody and have little thoughts about what the future may be like but also I think about the joy a child brings and funny stuff they do etc.

We have had multiple discussions about how we'd raise our kids and I've had little thoughts about what it might be like, names I'd like, dreams I'd like to achieve with them etc.

So would it be weird for me to create an email and send these thoughts & if we have a child and they hit their 18 birthday, to give them the password to it?

Im not sure of that idea, but email?!

How about handwriting, much more personal.

I like the idea but I wonder how it would work if you had more than one child. Would they share the account or would you start a new one for the second child (that wouldn't have the early bits)?

I think it's a very strange thing to do. You seem rather fixated and that's not healthy. There's a saying "life is what happens while you're making other plans". Don't wish your child free years away, try to enjoy your life now, not fixate on a hypothetical future.

What if you have more than one child?

First child gets all the doting 'we can't wait for you to arrive' emails. Second child gets two emails, one mistakenly saved over from a delayed Tesco delivery and the second is trying, but is mostly 'we can't wait to meet you' and then a row of random letters when his/her elder sister/brother put their hands all over the keyboard as you tried to type.

Write it down and keep it in a diary. Your 18 year old will probably be too self-obsessed to give it house room, sadly.

Unless you access the email yourself every so often, the emails would be gone long before the child get to see them.

@NameChangedNoImagination

But it is creepy.

An old friend of mine had a baby in her middle 40s, she has 2 older children in the late 20s.
She set up a Facebook account for her baby and puts photos and memories on there..

I did/do the email thing and have done since the day I got the positive pregnancy test. I would probably get a journal for your thoughts pre pregnancy and keep the emails for child centred observations.

I think that you are in Danger of having an inflexible idea of what you’re child and parenting will/ should be like If it’s all so thought through when it’s at this hypothetical stage.
Planing about practical stuff is understandable, but you might be setting yourself up for disappointment and frustration if you try to “ pin down” so much of the experience before it’s happened.

Op I'd go with a journal style, maybe buy one of those 5 year diaries so it's literally thoughts of the say.
Agree with pp that it will be loving paragraph after paragraph until baby is here and you're shattered and it's a sudden email once a year cos you forgot.

I have a diary that I kept when we started our adoption journey that I wrote as letters to my future child a few years ago. It's fascinating reading it back because there's a point you can sense a change and it's because we were very hopeful about a match, and then it becomes certain and he has a name and is about to be our son. I read it every so often and get tearful. I hope he reads it when he is older.

Buy a beautiful note book and keep it as a journal when you feel the urge.

A child is a unique person and not the same person that you imagine in pregnancy or babyhood.

I've still got my teenage diaries lovingly written most days, but half of it is incomprehensible gobbledygook 25 years on. All that wit and intellect wasted by the ravages of growing up

Write it down for yourself now, but don't expect it to be works of great interest that survive the passage of time. It may be cringeworthy to you, let alone your child.