The photos you'll wish you had taken

Scroll back through a year of photos of your child and you'll notice something: they are almost all events.

Birthdays. Holidays. The first day of something. Snow, if it snowed. A cake. Someone visiting. All real, all worth having — and all of them the same handful of days repeating, year after year, in slightly different clothes.

What's missing is everything in between, which is where the child actually lived.

We photograph occasions, not conditions

There's a reason for this, and it isn't carelessness.

A camera comes out when something is happening. Ordinary life is, by definition, not something happening — so the kitchen at seven in the morning never gets photographed, even though you were in it four hundred times that year and it is the single most accurate image of that period of your life.

The high chair with yesterday's dinner still on it. The specific chaos of the hallway. The corner of the sofa that had been slowly destroyed. The view from the changing table. The pushchair loaded like a pack animal.

"I have forty photos of the birthday. I don't have one of the flat we lived in."

Ask anyone with grown children which old photo they look at most, and it is rarely the posed one. It's the accidental one — the background, the room, the mess, the thing nobody was trying to capture.

The rule that fixes it

Once a month, photograph the room instead of the child.

That's it. Same room, no tidying, no arranging, nobody asked to smile. The kitchen as it is at breakfast. The cot from the doorway. The floor at six in the evening.

It will feel pointless. It photographs as nothing — a slightly untidy room, badly lit. Which is exactly why it survives: nobody else is taking that picture, and no amount of remembering will reconstruct it.

A short list worth having

• The room they sleep in, from the door, undressed and untidied
• The pushchair or car seat with everything in it
• Their hands doing something ordinary — holding a spoon, a cup, your finger
• The two of you as you actually look at eight in the morning
• Whatever is currently stuck to the fridge

Not one of those is a nice photograph. Every one of them will be worth more in ten years than the fifth angle of the same cake.

Why now rather than later

The trouble with ordinary conditions is that they don't announce their endings either. The flat changes, the high chair goes, the hallway gets tidied for good, and none of it happens on a day you'd think to record.

You already have the occasions. They're safe — everyone photographs those. It's the Tuesday morning that needs someone to decide, deliberately and slightly self-consciously, that it counts.