The day we couldn't remember why she was laughing

One evening a photo popped up on my phone. Our daughter, three years younger, was laughing in the backyard. My wife Vaama and I stared at it. We could see what happened. Neither of us could remember why she was laughing.

That bothered us more than we expected. Our second child had just arrived, and she kept shaking loose little glimpses of those early years with our first. Most of the glimpses had no edges. The funny things our daughter said had disappeared. So had the sweet ones. We had thousands of photos and almost none of the stories inside them.

Then came the bedtime questions

A Reddit post about family journaling gave us a simple idea: ask our daughter a few questions before bed and write down what she says. One night she asked about my day. I'm a cardiologist, so I told her I had tried to help a patient who got very sick, and that despite our best efforts we had to send him to a different hospital.

Her questions came fast, and each one went further than the last.

“Can the patient drive when his heart artery is blocked?”

No, we sent him by ambulance.

“What happens to his car if he's going by ambulance?”

“How does he sleep with a stent in his heart?”

I was stunned. She wasn't only hearing my words. She was picturing his whole day: his fear, his car, his sleep. Without that bedtime routine, I might never have noticed how she was learning to think about other people.

Yes, bedtime ran a few minutes late. School stories stretched long: playground politics, friends who disagreed, small triumphs. Some nights we were tired enough to switch off the light. Those extra minutes built a bond. They taught us how our daughter thinks, what worries her and what lights her up.

So we built the diary we wanted

You write a line in about ten seconds, and it sits beside your photo. Your partner writes in it too, and so do the grandparents. It lives in your own iCloud, and we never run a server that stores it. We left out likes, comments and followers on purpose. Nobody performs for a diary.

The enemy is the photo with no story. Everyone has hundreds of them. If you scroll your camera roll and wonder why everyone is laughing, Sprout Diary is for you.

What we promise

• We will never show ads.
• We will never sell your family's data.
• We will never store your diary on our servers.
• We will keep writing a post simple enough to finish in ten seconds.

We're Kaustubh and Vaama, parents of two. We built Sprout Diary because we wanted it. If it helps your family the way it helps ours, we'll call that a success.