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By the time a newborn is a month old, the photo folder on most parents' phones holds several hundred images. The sleeping face, the yawn, the glazed expression after a feed, the flushed cheeks after a bath. Each one is genuinely moving when viewed on its own. And yet scroll through them six months later and something strange happens: they start to blur into each other. Every frame looks like the same face.
The photos are not lying. The date and time stamp on each one is accurate. And yet something is missing when you look back — the thing that made you pick up the phone in the first place. Why did I decide to capture that particular moment?
This article is about why, in the first few months after birth, it is worth putting words alongside photos — or even before them. The argument is not sentimental. It is grounded in how memory works and in the specific cognitive circumstances that new parents are operating under.