Another Year Older
Both of my kids have birthdays this week. Which means, like every year, I find myself doing the same slightly dangerous thing of opening the folder of old photos and falling down a quiet rabbit hole of memories.
Photography does something strange when it mixes with parenthood. When you’re taking the photos, they feel ordinary. Just another afternoon on the sofa, another trip to the playground, another moment where someone is laughing so hard they can’t breathe. Nothing about it feels historic or important. You’re just pointing a camera at the chaos and hoping the focus lands somewhere useful.
But give it a few years, and suddenly those same photographs feel like small anchors in time.
The baby sitting on the floor with that permanently surprised expression.
The child buried in a ball pit, grinning like they’ve just discovered the meaning of life.
The careful concentration on a climbing frame that looked far more ambitious than it actually was.
That quiet look they get when they’re listening properly, which doesn’t happen as often as you’d hope.
What I realise now is that I’m not really photographing events. I’m photographing stages.
Children don’t grow in neat chapters the way we pretend they do in photo albums. They change in strange bursts. One week they’re small enough to sit quietly in your lap, and the next they’re climbing things that look structurally questionable while confidently explaining why they know exactly what they’re doing. Somewhere in between all of that, you take pictures.
Not because you think they’ll be meaningful one day, but because something in the moment makes you pause long enough to lift the camera.
Sometimes it’s laughter.
Sometimes it’s curiosity.
Sometimes it’s just the way the light falls across their face while they’re doing something completely unremarkable.
The funny part is that the photographs you think will matter often don’t. The carefully planned ones with everyone looking in the right direction rarely become the favourites.
Instead it’s the small, slightly imperfect ones that stay with you.
The grin with missing teeth. The hair sticking up in directions that defy physics. The look that says they’re about to ask a question you absolutely do not have the answer to.
Looking through these pictures this week, I realised something that every parent probably understands but rarely says out loud.
The camera isn’t really for them. It’s for us. Because when you’re living inside the daily rhythm of parenting - school runs, snacks, socks that mysteriously vanish in pairs, time moves slowly enough that you think you’ve got plenty of it. Then a birthday arrives, and you realise another year has quietly slipped past while you were busy tying shoelaces and negotiating bedtime.
And suddenly the photographs feel like little proof that you were paying attention. That you noticed who they were becoming. Not perfectly. Not every day. But enough to catch a few moments along the way.