I’ve been keeping a daily journal for well over a decade now. Every night, I write a little note to myself about what I did that day or what I learned. Often, I’ll go back and look through old entries to remind myself of the progress that I’ve made or the things I’ve done.
But what I didn’t expect about parenting is that my phone’s photo album would be just as powerful of a reminder tool.
I’ll often look back through the archives to see what photos I took a year ago on this date. With a one-year-old, the photos are astonishing — could our son really have been that small a year ago? That bald? Remember that outfit? He used to fit into it all the time! Remember that trip we took? Yeah, that was a year ago today, too.
The time really does go by as quickly as everyone says, and it’s by grounding yourself in these moments from the past that you can appreciate the progress. I know a year from now, I’ll be amazed at the things my son is doing that he couldn’t in the fall of 2024.
Make time to pause and to rewind. We all need those moments to show us how far we’ve come.
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That’s a screenshot of my phone’s photo album. A funny thing happens when you have a kid: You replace lots of photos of food and trips with literally thousands of photos of your kid.