Her first two years are in five different chats.
Lotta is two, and lives in Austria. Her Oma Lou lives in the Netherlands — a thousand kilometres — and the rest of the family is spread out in between.
So the photos go out in bursts. Some to the Austrian group, some to the Dutch one, some to Oma on her own, some to nobody at all.
Sending a photo isn't keeping it
Nobody ends up with the same set. Nobody knows who has seen what, so you send the good ones twice and the rest not at all.
And six weeks later, when you want the one with the bicycle helmet: it is in a thread from March, or fourteen thousand deep in a camera roll. Neither of you will ever find it again.
And a photo is only the outside of a day
It doesn't carry that she calls the hospital the "hopsital", with such conviction that nobody has the heart to correct her. Or that she stood at the edge of a puddle for a full minute, entirely serious, then jumped in and turned round to check you had seen.
Oma wasn't missing the pictures. She was missing the person.
So we bought the journal. Everyone buys the journal.
And then we found out what everyone finds out: the moment worth writing down is never a moment you can write. It is bath time. It is the supermarket. It is a small hand in yours on the way to nursery.
Ours stopped in month four. Most of them do.
But we could always talk about her
In the hallway, in the car, in the two minutes before she woke up again. The story was never the hard part. The typing was.
So we built the thing we already needed.
Press record, say what happened, and put the afternoon's photos with it. LottaLou writes the words down and keeps them as yours, files the day against how old she was, and shows the whole thing to everyone who loves her. One place, not five chats.
Oma reads about Tuesday on Tuesday
She gets the words and the pictures together, the same evening, and so does everybody else — no forwarding, no working out who was left off which thread.
She adds moments of her own, too. She isn't an audience. She's in it.
And then, without meaning to, a book
A year of this turns into something. Not a chat history, and not fourteen thousand photos nobody will ever sort — a book, dated, in order, each photo beside what was happening in it.
Lotta can read it at twenty-five and find out exactly who she was at two. And who her parents were, while they were working it out.
We set out to keep a grandmother company. We ended up making an heirloom.
The name is Lotta, and her Oma Lou. It seemed only fair.
Start keeping this year.
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