Our story

A thousand kilometres, and a little girl in the middle of it.

Lotta is two. She lives in Austria, in a flat where the hallway is a racetrack and the bath is a negotiation.

Her Oma Lou lives in the Netherlands. That is a thousand kilometres — one long drive, or one short flight, and a handful of visits a year.

In between the visits, Oma got photos. Plenty of them. Lotta in the snow. Lotta wearing a bicycle helmet indoors, for reasons of her own. Lotta asleep in a position that made no anatomical sense.

And photos are wonderful. But a photo is the outside of a day.

It does not carry that she has started calling the hospital the "hopsital", and says it with such conviction that nobody has the heart to correct her. It does not carry that she stood at the edge of a puddle for a full minute, entirely serious, before jumping in with both feet and turning round to check you had seen. It does not carry that on Tuesday she was inconsolable about a sock, that you laughed about it afterwards in the kitchen, and that you thought — briefly, and for once — that you might be doing an alright job of this.

That was what Oma was missing. Not the pictures. The person.

The evening that never comes

We knew what you are supposed to do about that. Write it down. Keep a journal. We bought the book. We had every intention.

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 middle of the supermarket. It is a small hand in yours on the way to nursery. The evening you were going to catch up in is the evening you fall asleep on the sofa at half past eight, still dressed.

Ours stopped in month four. Most of them do.

Twenty seconds, out loud

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.

Twenty seconds of talking, and the moment is kept. Not the outside of the day — the actual thing. What she said. What she did. How it felt to be standing there watching her do it.

For Oma, and for later

Two things came out of that, and we only expected one of them.

The first is Oma Lou. She opens the app in the Netherlands and reads about a Tuesday in Austria while it is still Tuesday. She knows about the hopsital. She adds moments of her own, too — the things she notices on a video call that we are too close to see. She is not an audience. She is in it.

The second one surprised us. A year of this turns into something. Not a camera roll of fourteen thousand photographs that nobody will ever sort. A book — dated, in order, in the voices of the people who were there — that Lotta can read when she is 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

Lotta, and her Oma Lou. It seemed only fair.