Field note: adapted from the first entry of a Korean growth log I began in 2024. The public original included measurements, feeding amounts and product names. I have left those out of the English edition because they add exposure without helping another family. This is memory, not medical guidance.
I started keeping a monthly log because of a small, embarrassing discovery: I had already forgotten the newborn weeks. INa was only about a hundred days old, and when I tried to picture the first fortnight of her life, almost nothing came back with any detail.
The trigger was a friend's blog. A baby born around the same time as ours had a growth record, and reading it made me realise how much of our own month existed only as a blur. In Korea there is a joke that you give birth to your brain along with the baby. That month I stopped finding it funny.
So I made a deal with myself. A daily diary was never going to happen. A monthly entry might. This is what came out of the first attempt.
Day One: The Untidy Sentence
The birth did not follow the plan I had spent months preparing. In the log I refused to polish that feeling away. The sentence I kept was addressed to her and held both parts at once: disappointment about the route, and love for the person who arrived.
That is the whole of what I want to carry into this English version of day one.
Day Five: The Ten Minutes Between Hospital and Care Centre
We were discharged and went straight to the postpartum care centre we had booked.
What I remember with total clarity is not the paperwork or the room. It is that the drive took under ten minutes and my husband was shaking for all of it. Something about being handed a newborn and a car key on the same morning does that.
The days there were confining and, at the same time, among the happiest of that period. Staff kept telling us she slept well and had an easy temperament, and we repeated the word easy to each other constantly.
Day Fifteen: Home, and Ten Days on Our Own
Coming home is where the log becomes practical. The postpartum helper was not due for another ten days, so the three of us began at home without that support.
The gap between a building where meals appeared at the door and a flat where nobody brought them was immediate. Her skin changed too, and we worried over it for days. I have removed the products and treatment details here; the useful truth is the scale of the attention, not what we applied.
Day Nineteen: The Load Became Visible
By then round-the-clock feeding had become the whole shape of the day. Day, night and the small hours were labels rather than schedules. The original entry also records that my husband remembered this stretch as less difficult than I did. I am leaving that contrast exactly where it is.
A Few Days Later: Out of the House
At the end of the month we met a friend's baby who had been a companion since both were still pregnancies, and we took our first photograph as a family of three.
My main observation about that photograph is that both adults look wrecked. My second is that we went to a department store and practically every person who passed said the same thing: she is so small.
At a check around that period, a room of smaller newborns finally showed me how quickly she had already changed. Every day had looked the same from inside it; the comparison made the month visible.
What the Log Is Actually For
I set out to make a record for INa, and I assumed the value would be in the data. It is not. Anything measurable was already written down somewhere more reliable than my blog.
What the log preserves is the texture: that my husband's hands shook in the car, that we clung to the word easy like a life raft, that a rash could take over a week of our lives, that the first family photograph shows two exhausted people who were, on balance, happy.
Monthly was the interval I could maintain. Daily would have collapsed quickly, and yearly would have been too late: I had already lost most of the texture within one hundred days. The imperfect entry exists, which is more than memory had managed on its own.
Sources checked
Last reviewed August 29, 2026.
- Original Korean growth log – first month — Naver Blog (banggujin)
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