Document Your Baby’s First Year Of Life With ‘1 Second Everyday’

Yes, it’s cliché to exclaim that kids “grow up so fast!” But it’s become a cliché because it’s true. Especially when it comes to babies, the developmental changes children undergo from birth to one year old are staggering and can seem to happen miraculously overnight, even though you just spent the whole year staring right at them.

Enter the 1 Second Everyday app. With this app, users film one second of video every day for a year to create a six-minute and five-second video (or six minutes and six seconds this year, since 2020 is a leap year).

Capture a daily second of your baby in the same spot in their crib or eating spaghetti or cooing in their bouncer. Capture any favourite moment, from the big ones (first steps!) to the humdrum ones (oh, another nap). From second to second, you’ll see the same child, but over the course of, say, half a minute, you’ll have covered a whole month of their new lives. There are also spots to enter a small caption and journal a bit about your day.

Admittedly, doing this for 365 days straight might feel redundant, and it’ll take a little creativity to capture video that doesn’t. But that’s where the magic can happen, in those little moments that don’t feel like anything special at the time.

Of course, this app isn’t exclusively for newborns. 1 Second Everyday can capture any part of life, whether your goal is to track a child’s growth or general family memories: “Hey, that’s the night we went to the basketball game” or “Remember that awful egg casserole that was still runny after an hour in the oven?” I’m sure there’s an incredible video to be made of Mummy’s belly growing over the course of a pregnancy and another of a child’s senior year of high school.

Cesar Kuriyama, the app’s creator, gave a Ted Talk in March 2012 about why the app is important. He said:

There’s all these things I’ve done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and I think, “Oh yeah, that’s something that I did.” … As the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other, and I hated that. And visualisation is the way to trigger memory.

Kuriyama has been recording one second of his daily life since he turned 30. Now, he’s 36, and he has a video that documents his entire thirties. He plans to do this for the rest of his life.

The app is free, although there is a pro version that allows for extras like longer video snippets, background music and unlimited storage and projects. But honestly, the free one is plenty to prove that these kids do, indeed, grow up too fast.