The grandparent questions you'll wish you'd recorded

Your child is not the first person in your family to be one year old.

Somewhere in the room at Sunday lunch is a person who watched their own child do all of this — refuse the same foods, wake at the same hour, hold a spoon the same wrong way. They are watching your version of it with an expression you probably read as fondness, and it is partly that, and partly recognition.

And almost nobody asks them anything.

What they actually know

Not general wisdom. Nobody needs another round of advice about draughts.

What they have is specific and unrepeatable: what your partner was like as a toddler. Which side of the family the sleeping comes from. What your mother-in-law did on the nights nothing worked, in a house with no internet and no one to ask. The name of the toy that got lost on a train in 1987 and was mourned for a month.

"I found out at his mum's eightieth that he refused to walk until he was nearly two. Nobody had ever mentioned it."

None of that is written down anywhere. It is not in a file, or a photograph, or a hospital record. It exists in one or two people, and only for as long as somebody thinks to ask.

Why it never comes up

Because the conversation is always about the baby who is currently in the room, and reasonably so.

Nobody at a family lunch says "tell me what he was like at fourteen months" — it feels like an odd thing to introduce. So the stories only surface by accident, triggered by something your child happens to do, and then only in fragments, and then the plates get cleared.

Worth asking, this year

These work better than general questions, because they can be answered specifically.

• What was I — or my partner — like at exactly this age?
• What was the hardest month, and what did you do?
• What did we eat, refuse, carry, insist on?
• What did the house sound like — songs, radio, the same record?
• What do you remember that nobody else in the family does?

That last one is the best question in the list. Everyone has a small hoard of things they assume are common knowledge and that nobody else actually retained.

How to keep it

Write it down badly, in the moment, rather than well, later. A note on your phone at the table beats a plan to record something properly one day.

Better still: a voice note, asked for directly. Most people find "can I record you saying that?" much easier to agree to than they expect, and the recording keeps something the words alone don't — the pauses, the laugh, the way they say your partner's name.

Both directions at once

The nice part is that this isn't only for your child.

Asking these questions is one of the few things that reliably makes an older relative light up, because it treats them as the keeper of something rather than a spectator to your busy year. And you'll come away knowing things about your own family that you'd have gone your whole life not knowing.

One lunch. Five questions. Written down badly on a phone, at the table, while everyone is still there.