By month three you’ll have nine hundred photographs of the same animal asleep in roughly the same position, and by month four you’ll have stopped looking at them.
The photographs aren’t the problem. Volume is. A record nobody is willing to go through has quietly stopped being a record.
Photographs hold the face, not the behaviour
A photograph is a frame and a puppy is a sequence. The face you’ll remember anyway, because you looked at it every day for a year and it’s on your phone nine hundred times over.
What goes is everything the animal did. The fortnight she couldn’t manage stairs and had to be carried down like a bag of shopping. The way he sat in the empty bath for no reason anybody ever established. The bin she was frightened of until one day she wasn’t. The particular noise. The sitting-on-your-foot.
Those stop, usually without your noticing which day was the last one, and none of them photograph. A comic panel holds them because a panel holds an action and a caption holds the context, which is about the minimum a memory needs if it’s going to survive a decade.
What the first year is made of
Not the milestones. Milestones are the easy part and every pet app in the store will prompt you for them: first walk, first vet visit, first birthday.
The things people miss when they look back years later are smaller and stranger.
- The fears, which are always ridiculous and always specific. The hoover, the coat rack, one particular paving slab.
- The failed training. The month spent teaching a recall that was obeyed exactly twice.
- The furniture. A house rearranges itself around a new animal and then rearranges back, and nobody photographs either state.
- The nicknames. Everybody ends up with four for one dog and nobody can later remember where any of them came from.
- The size, next to something fixed. Beside the sofa, in the footwell, filling the bed.
That last one is the single most useful thing to record deliberately. Size changes so gradually that you can’t see it happening, and the same animal drawn in the same spot each month does what pencil marks on a doorframe do for a child.
A twelve-panel spine
If you’d rather have a structure than a shoebox, one strip a month for twelve months gives you a book at the end and costs about ten minutes a month.
Record the same three things every time: the animal in the same place for scale, one thing they learned to do, one thing they were doing that month that they’d later stop. Everything else is optional.
Fill in the ordinary days between if you can be bothered. The monthly strips give you the shape of the year. The Tuesday he got at an entire loaf is what you’ll open the book for.
Do it on the day
Retrospect is what ruins all of this. Sit down in December to write about April and you’ll produce “she was small and chewed things”, because the specifics have already gone and what’s left is the general impression.
One line written on the day beats a page written from memory a year later. That’s the argument for keeping any daily record, and it just runs faster here, because a dog’s first year is over in a year.
The part nobody wants to plan for
Fifteen years isn’t long, and it’s why first-year archives matter more for animals than they do for people.
Everyone who’s lost one says roughly the same thing about what they wish they had, and it isn’t more photographs. It’s the daft habits, the noises, the way it moved around the house. All behaviour, and behaviour only survives if somebody wrote it down while it was still routine enough to seem not worth recording.
Stripkin does this with almost no effort on your part: say what the dog did today, and a strip comes back with the same recognisable dog in it as last month’s. A notebook and one line a day does the same job more slowly and costs nothing at all. The mistake is either way assuming you’ll remember, because it’s a lot of days and almost none of them will still be there.