Lead
A parenting log is a record of the child. That seemed obvious.
Then one day you notice: you are in the record too. The short line written the day your child first smiled includes "didn't sleep much today." The 2 a.m. feeding entry is just a timestamp. In the corner of the photo from the first day of preschool, your fingers appear at the edge of the frame.
A record of a child's development is also a stratigraphic layer of the parent's own transformation. This article is about the rewriting of one's own story that happens during the years of raising a young child. And as the hundredth and final article in this column, it is also an occasion to ask what the act of recording means from one step further back.