A baby book for your second (or third) child

With your first baby, you had time to notice everything. You wrote down the first smile to the day. You measured, photographed and labelled. Then the second one arrived, and suddenly there were two people needing breakfast, a school run, and approximately no spare minutes.

The baby book went in a drawer with good intentions. Every so often you take it out, feel bad, and put it back. Meanwhile your younger child is growing up, and one day they will find their sibling's full book next to their sparse one and ask the obvious question.

Here's the thing: you haven't loved them less or noticed less. You've just had less time to sit down. The problem isn't you — it's a format that needs quiet evenings you no longer have.

A traditional baby book asks for a sit-down session with a pen. A minute a day asks for almost nothing: one sentence, typed or spoken, at the moment something happens. The baby laughed at the dog. Their big sister made them a crown. They ate a whole banana and looked amazed.

Those tiny entries add up quickly. A sentence on most days is several hundred memories by their first birthday — more than most first-child books ever hold. And because each one is written in the moment, the details are sharper than anything you'd recall weeks later.

• Talk, don't write. A voice note while you're pushing the buggy counts. It gets transcribed for you.
• Snap and caption. You're taking the photo anyway — add one line about why.
• Skip the forms. You don't need weight charts and first-tooth dates if they're not what you'll treasure.
• Let others help. Grandparents and older siblings notice things you miss. Let them add memories too.

A second or third child grows up in a busier house, surrounded by someone bigger to copy. That's not a lesser story, it's its own story, and it's worth capturing:

• How their older sibling reacted when they first met.
• The games the two of them play that nobody else understands.
• The things they picked up early because they were desperate to keep up.
• The ways they're completely unlike their sibling — and the ways they're the same.
• The things they say — second children are often the comedians. Our guide to funny things kids say has tips on catching them.

It is never too late to start. If your second child is two, or six, or eleven, start where they are now. Today's memory is just as valuable as one from infancy — and in some ways more, because it's the one you're about to forget.

If you want to fill in some of the gap, do it gently. Ask yourself a few questions about the early days and write down what you remember: their birth, their first home, the nickname that stuck. The first-year questions help, and so do grandparents, who often remember more than you think. Then move on to the present, using the questions for their age — say, age three. Nobody is checking for gaps.

In And Then You, every child in the family gets their own timeline, and you can add a memory for one child or several at once — handy when siblings do something together. Gentle reminders tell you which children haven't been written about lately, so nobody quietly slips to the bottom of the pile.

When you're ready, gather a year into a keepsake for each child. Wondering whether to stick with paper as well? Here's an honest look at digital vs printed baby books.

Part of what makes the first child's book so full is that it was a project. For the second, it doesn't need to be. Short entries are fine. Spelling mistakes are fine. A blurry photo with one line underneath is fine. Your child won't care about a missed week; they'll care that you noticed them and wrote it down. If it helps, set a reminder for once a week rather than every day, and treat anything more as a bonus. A steady trickle of small memories will beat a burst of guilt-fuelled effort every time.

There's no need to compete with it, and no need to abandon it either. If your eldest's paper book stopped at month eight, you can carry on their story in the same place as their sibling's, so both children are written about side by side from now on. Some families photograph the best pages of the old book and add them as memories, so everything lives together. Others keep the paper book as a treasured object and simply start fresh. Either way, the goal isn't two identical books. It's two children who each know their story was kept.