When we began making the journal, we asked a few parents to write a letter to their baby, the kind they would want opened years from now. We expected a paragraph or two. We received pages.
A mother in Jaipur wrote to her daughter about the night she arrived. Not the hospital, not the timing, but the auto ride home three days later, her husband holding the car seat with both hands like it was made of glass, the whole city suddenly full of things to be careful about.
A father in Kochi wrote a single page about his son's hands. He wrote that he had never watched anything as closely in his life, and that he was afraid of the day he would stop noticing. He said the letter was a promise to keep noticing.
The letter was a promise to keep noticing.
A grandmother wrote the third. She raised her children without photographs of the ordinary days, and she told her granddaughter what she wished someone had kept for her: the lullaby her own mother sang, the smell of the kitchen on winter mornings, the name of the neighbour who helped when no one else could.
There is a page in me waiting for a letter like this.
None of these letters were written by writers. They were written by people who loved someone small and wanted the loving to last longer than memory allows. That is all a letter needs.
If you write one thing in your baby's first year, write them a letter. Seal it if you like. The journal has an envelope that waits until they are eighteen.