A Journal for New Parents
one line a night, while it's all a blur
Somebody gave you the beautiful baby book. It has a place for the first tooth and the first word and a ribbon down the spine, and right now it has three pages filled in and a pen still sitting in it. There was never a bad evening to write in it — there was just never an evening with enough left over.
Meanwhile the days are going past very fast and blurring as they go. People keep saying you’ll remember all of this, and you already know that you won’t, because last month is mostly gone and it was only last month.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Peaches at the stand. Bought far too many.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
One sentence is enough to hold a day
Little Memory is an iPhone app, and an entry in it is one line about something that happened, roughly fifteen seconds. She found her feet today. Slept four hours in a row, which felt like a holiday. He laughed at the ceiling fan for ten minutes. No milestone chart, no stickers, nothing to keep neat.
Plain lines are the ones that work. A year from now, laughed at the ceiling fan brings back the whole living room — the light, how tired you were, all of it — and no beautifully written paragraph would have done it better. A photo counts as an entry on its own, for the nights when even the sentence is more than you’ve got.
It happens where you already are
You’re holding a phone at 9pm anyway. A quiet reminder arrives in the evening, and replying to it saves the day’s entry. Nothing to find, nothing to open, nothing to keep on the shelf and feel guilty about walking past.
And then it comes back to you
This is the part that makes it worth the fifteen seconds. Your lines return to you a week later, a month later, and a year later, on their own. You’ll be standing in the kitchen a year from now and a sentence will arrive about a baby who couldn’t sit up yet, written by you, about a day you had entirely forgotten. It’s the closest thing to a time capsule you can build fifteen seconds at a time.
The keepsake makes itself, out of ordinary Tuesdays, without ever needing an evening you don’t have.
I love watching my son grow and remember the beauty of every little day!
L., reader letter
The nights you don’t write
There will be plenty. A day you missed is just a day that isn’t there, and the journal is still a journal, gaps and all. Nothing has to be caught up, and yesterday stays writable all through today, so the nights that disappear on you are often still there in the morning. (There’s a page about missing a day if you’d like it.)
Over 30,000 people have kept more than 1,000,000 little memories here since 2011. Have a look at on this day to see how the coming-back works, or take the little tour and write tonight’s one line.
