My Oldest Is Turning 4 and My Younger Is 18 Months: I Love This Age and I’m Trying Not to Forget It
This morning, Lila was sitting on the kitchen floor trying to put on her older sister’s rain boots. She’s 18 months old, so the boots were about three sizes too big. Maya, who turns 4 next week, came over, knelt down, and said, “No, Lila. These are mine. Here, you wear the pink ones.” Then she took the pink boots from the pile and held them out. Lila looked at her for a second, dropped the rain boots, and sat down to let Maya help. It wasn’t a big moment. No one clapped. But I stood there with a half-empty coffee cup and thought, I want to remember this.
That’s the thing about having a 4-year-old and an 18-month-old. You get these tiny windows where you can see them becoming who they are. Maya is starting to understand other people’s feelings. She invents complicated stories with her stuffed animals and gets genuinely upset when her sister won’t follow the plot. Lila is learning new words every day. She points at everything and says “that” with a rising note, as if she needs me to confirm that the dog, the lamp, and the Cheerio all exist. They’re both right in the middle of something big, and I’m so aware of it that it almost hurts.
This is also an age that disappears faster than the early baby years. With a newborn, everyone tells you to take pictures because they grow so fast. But at least a newborn stays in one place. A toddler and a preschooler are constantly in motion. They are changing in front of me, and I’m not always looking.
I have 12,000 photos on my phone. Maybe more. I’ve taken videos of Maya singing and Lila laughing until she snorts. I’ve saved handprint crafts, tiny drawings, and the first scribble that looked like it might be a face. And still, I’m scared I’m going to forget.
I already have. I don’t remember when Lila started walking. I know it was near the couch, but I don’t remember the sound of her feet on the wood floor. I don’t remember what Maya said the first time she met her sister in the hospital. Last week I watched a video of it and thought, I don’t remember this at all. It felt like watching someone else’s family.
That video put me in a weird mood. I spent the next few days chasing moments with my phone. If Lila made a face, I filmed it. If Maya said something funny, I asked her to say it again to record it. By the third day, Maya started turning away when she saw the camera, and Lila would stop what she was doing to run toward me. I wasn’t preserving anything. I was interrupting it.
So I stopped. Or, at least, I’m trying to stop.
I’m learning that memory is not a recording. It’s more like a story we tell ourselves, and stories need details. I can’t capture everything, but I can collect the pieces that matter. When I catch a moment like the rain boots, I don’t reach for my phone anymore. I stay in it. I notice what Lila is wearing, what Maya’s voice sounds like, how the morning light looks through the window. Later, I write it down.
Not a whole journal entry. Just a few plain lines in a notes app. “Maya helped Lila with her boots. Said, ‘Here, you wear the pink ones.’ Lila sat down and waited. They held hands for a minute while watching the dog.” It takes less than 30 seconds, and it makes the memory stick. I have about 40 of those notes now, worth more than the videos I took in the first two years.
I also started doing something that felt strange at first: I asked Maya to tell me about her day. Not the classic “what did you do today” question, which gets you nowhere. I ask specific things. “What made you laugh today?” or “What did you and Lila do while I was making lunch?” Sometimes she says, “I don’t know.” Other times she says, “Lila threw my puzzle and I had to save it.” She’s building her own memory, and her version is just as real as mine. Listening to her remember helps me remember too.
Another small thing: I started taking the same photo every month. Just the girls standing next to the front door. In the first one, Lila can barely reach the doorknob and Maya is holding her hand. In the next one, Lila is a little taller and Maya leans on her shoulder. It’s not artsy. It’s boring. But when I scroll through them, I can see time moving in a way I can’t see in a hundred random snapshots.
I also record their voices more than their faces. Voice memos are maybe the best thing I’ve discovered. I hide my phone behind a book on the shelf while Lila “reads” her board book or while Maya sings made-up songs in the bathtub. I don’t hold a camera. I just press record and let them be. Their voices are changing so fast. Lila already doesn’t sound like she did last month. Maya’s little lisp is fading. I want to remember the sounds more than the pictures, honestly.
Of course, all of this is a little bit sad. There’s no way to keep this age. I know that. Maya will turn 4 and then 5, and she’ll stop asking me to play “family” with her stuffed animals. Lila will learn to say her own name, and she won’t call herself “Lala” anymore. Even writing that makes me feel like I’m losing something.
But I’m also noticing that the more I pay attention, the less panicked I feel. The worry comes from thinking I’ll be left with nothing. But I have notes and voice memos and a door frame with pencil marks. I have the memory of this morning, and I’m pretty sure I’ll keep it, because I did something with it. I stayed. I watched. I wrote it down later.
There will still be days when I realize I don’t remember something. That’s inevitable. I’ll find another video of Lila from last year and be shocked that I don’t recognize her. I’ll say, “She was that small?” And it will bother me. But I think that’s part of it. We can’t hold every moment. We can only keep a few, and we get to choose which ones.
Right now, I’m trying to choose the small ones. Not the big milestones. The rain boots. The way Lila says “that” about everything. Maya’s gentle “No, Lila” when she’s being a good big sister. I don’t know if these are the memories that will survive. But I’m giving them a better chance than I was before.
Maya turns 4 next Friday. Lila will keep growing. I’ll keep taking notes, and I’ll probably miss a bunch of moments while I’m doing it. That’s okay. I’ve stopped trying to get it all. I’m just trying to get enough.
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