I'm going to tell you something I'm not proud of. My daughter took her first steps, and I almost missed them because I was reading a Reddit thread about someone else's parenting advice.
The irony still stings.
It was a Saturday afternoon. Lily was 11 months old, pulling herself up on the coffee table the way she'd been doing for weeks. My wife was in the kitchen. I was 'watching' Lily — which really meant sitting on the couch with my phone, glancing up every 30 seconds.
My wife screamed 'She's walking!' and I looked up just in time to see step four. Steps one, two, and three happened while I was choosing between upvoting a comment.
I caught the last two steps. But in that moment, I felt something break inside me. Not anger — shame. Because this wasn't the first milestone I'd half-seen through the fog of my phone. First solid food? I was filming it AND checking Slack. First time at the park? I spent half of it on a bench answering emails.
That evening, I searched 'how to stop looking at my phone around kids' and found Family First. The Protected Moments feature let me block everything except calls during what I now call 'Lily Time' — 5pm to 7:30pm every day.
It's been seven months. Last week, Lily said her first sentence: 'Dada, look!' And you know what? I was already looking.
