Sometimes it was a souvenir from the chaos of parenting worth savoring.
Sometimes it was a peek at a photo from the thousands I’d never paid attention to, and sometimes it was a milestone-no more training wheels, the tooth fairy’s first appearance, landing in Dublin. Without knowing it, I’d selected the option to rotate my wallpaper photo at the top of every hour.įor weeks, opening my phone sparked a sentimental surprise. But I bypassed all notifications when I saw my oldest, now 8, grinning at me from my phone screen with only half a mouth of teeth on his first day of second grade. On my way back from school drop-off hours later, I looked to see what work Slack messages awaited me. Smiling back at me was my middle child, Tess, proud of herself for independently holding a Di Bruno Bros bag full of cheeses and meats, our haul for a picnic lunch at our park down the street later that day. When I hit snooze on my phone the next morning, I smiled. I didn’t understand where the photo was pulled from, so I explored the setting further: Who else’s Featured Photos should I include in this Photo Shuffle? I selected each of my kid’s faces, passed on my husband’s and cat’s (sorry), and clicked Done. I selected the option, which immediately turned my iPhone’s background image into the sweetest photo of Ivy, now a curious baby who has a masterful bum-shuffle and refuses to crawl or walk. At bedtime one night, I got lost in my iPhone’s settings and stumbled upon a feature called Photo Shuffle. In fact, I didn’t change it until almost a year after Ivy was born. The hit of nostalgia it gave me was enough to keep me from making a change. My phone’s home screen was stuck in November 2019. They were sweaty and giddy, sprawled in Brooklyn Bridge Park, and it was a time capsule from pre-pandemic days: before they transitioned from toddlers to actual children, before a mid-lockdown exodus to Philadelphia, before we left our closest friends for a city we’re still struggling to find footing in. My iPhone’s wallpaper was a photo of my two older kids taken years before.
As friends and family members conveyer-belted their way through my postpartum haze with onesies and trays of lasagna, they’d comment as I picked up my phone (usually to take photo evidence of their first newborn squeeze): “Ivy hasn’t made the cut?” The time I felt most judged as a parent happened just after my third child was born.
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