A moment comes, maybe a year later, maybe five years later, when you come across a photo from those first weeks. Your baby, small and wrinkled, sleeping on your chest. You recognise the onesie. You recognise the sofa. But you no longer remember how that felt. The weight. The warmth. How you held your breath because you didn't want it to stop.

Photos are faithful to how something looked. But the feeling — that is something else. It isn't stored in a pixel. And if you haven't written it down somewhere, it is simply gone. Not a little hazy. Gone.

Capturing memories of your baby means, for most people: taking photos. And that is beautiful. But it is half the story.

What disappears without words

It isn't about the big things. Those you remember, more or less. The first step, the first sentence, that one holiday.

It is about the small things that feel so ordinary in the moment that you think: I will never forget this. And then you forget them anyway.

  • The sound your baby made when he was almost asleep, that small sigh, as if he was surrendering to sleep.
  • How you felt on an ordinary Tuesday, tired but also calm, as you looked at that sleeping little face.
  • What you were thinking in those first nights, the things you never said out loud because they seemed too big or too strange.
  • The smell of his head. How you kept leaning towards it, even when you actually had something else to do.

These are not special occasions. This is the ordinary life of that year. And ordinary life is precisely what disappears.

Writing as capturing memories, not as an achievement

Many parents start a diary and give up. Not because they don't want to, but because a blank notebook asks something of you that you have no answer to during that period: do you know where to begin?

A blank page is demanding. It asks for structure, for an order, for the energy to get started. And when you have spent three months just surviving, that is a lot to ask.

"I really had good intentions. But every time I opened the diary, I didn't know what to write. So I just put it away."

— Roos, mother of Bas (14 months)

That feeling is not a lack of motivation. It is a logical consequence of how writing works when there is no starting point.

What helps is a question. A concrete question, at the right moment. Not: write about this year. But: what did your baby do for the first time yesterday? Or: what did your usual evening routine look like this month?

That is also why YearChapter sends monthly questions — and those questions are based on what you have filled in before. Not generic questions, but questions that connect to your story so far. You don't have to think about where to begin. You simply start with that one question, on your phone, wherever you are.

The article about what you can write down in the first year also has a few concrete ideas for when you find yourself stuck.

What your child will want to read later

I sometimes think about what my child would want to know about this year in twenty years' time. And I don't think it will be the milestones. Those are already in the photos.

I think she will want to know how I felt. Whether I was scared. Whether I found it hard. Whether I was happy. Whether I had doubts. Whether I was sometimes just tired, and that it was still all right.

Those are the things that tell her something about who I was at the moment when she was still too small to remember it herself. And that is something no album can give her.

If you are curious about why imperfect, honest memories are actually more valuable than perfect accounts, read on in this article about why your child will not want to know how perfect it all was.

One sentence is already enough

You don't have to be a writer. You don't have to craft beautiful sentences. A two-line note on a Monday evening is worth more than an empty diary waiting for the perfect moment.

Write down how it smelled. Write down what you thought when your child laughed for the first time and you weren't sure whether it was real. Write down that you sometimes found it hard, and that that was part of this year too.

Later, you will want to know that. Not just what your baby looked like. But who you were, in that year, in that life that is passing so quickly now.