<p>An</a> Empty Nest Brings New Context To Old Voicemails : NPR</p>
<p>It's a tearjerker. Like you need to be warned. :)</p>
<p>I listened to this on my way to work this morning. The tapes were so sweet. Wish I had some from when my kids were little.</p>
<p>I have one, archived forever, from my middle child. She gives me her full name and our home phone number, complete with area code, asking me to call her back. She was about 5.</p>
<p>Only recently lost two precious voicemails after years of archival; hopefully the dozens of replays have burned them into my memory permanently.</p>
<p>Oh, gosh, this reminds me of the talking picture frame we got for my mother when my son was about 3. He recorded himself saying “Happy birthday, Mimi, I love you!”. Whenver you picked up the frame, the recording would play. My mother was just crazy about it and she loved to play it often.</p>
<p>A couple of years later, I was afraid that the battery was getting low. The frame came with instructions on how to change the battery without losing the recording. I think you had to hold down a little button while you disconnected the old battery and snapped in a new one. Well, of course my finger slipped off the button when I was trying to be so careful, and the recording was deleted! :eek: I was afraid to tell Mom so I snuck into the other room with my now 6-year-old son and had him re-record the message trying to sound like he was 3! Apparently, he did a good enough job of it because Mom never noticed the difference. We finally told her the truth about 10 years later. She was not amused. :mad:</p>
<p>patsmom, LOL!!!</p>
<p>My daughter had the sweetest voice when she was little. I was almost always home, so no sweet recordings for me.</p>
<p>Our answering machine has my girls voices when they were five and seven. This is the …please leave a message at the beeeeep…</p>
<p>Wen they were in middle school they hated it, now they love it, they sound like the lollipop gulid</p>
<p>I remember when my oldest must have been about 4 years old and sang The full Teddy Bear’s picnic song. (“If you go down in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…”). Now 25, his endearing, high pitched voice has changed a little since then, but I didn’t have a tape recorder and back then, we didn’t have answering machines. I still remember it so clearly as if it were yesterday and we still have the book somewhere, but those days of singing songs like that are long gone.</p>