Dog hair.  Dog hair everywhere.

Stacks of junk mail.  It’s not that I don’t ever throw the stuff away — it’s that my daughter thinks junk mail is the best thing on earth.  And who am I to argue?  It’s free, it brings her an incredible amount of glee, and it’s easily recyclable when she gets bored with the current stack.

Identifying photos of my daughter.  This is the big one, the hard one.  Now that she’ll be three later this year, I’m trying to pull back from posting identifying photos of her on my Instagram feed and elsewhere.  And this isn’t a judgment on those who do post photos of their kids past babyhood — but it’s definitely what feels right for our family.

It’s strange to raise a child when every move can be tracked, every milestone and embarrassing moment and potty success can be documented for consumption beyond the walls of our house.  It feels strange to have people I don’t know at some level “know” my daughter.  It’s strange to think that even now, searching her name pulls up a photo from my blog from her birthday party.  And it’s a cute photo!  But it’s an experience I personally will never understand, since my 80’s toddler photos aren’t easily findable on the Internet.

So I’m trying to tread lightly by leaving a digital imprint with boundaries.  Baby photos felt like a comfortable boundary for our family because to me, babies are…rather interchangeable.  I mean, you’ve got your small babies and tall babies, summer and fall babies (thanks Everywhere Babies!) but even with babies who are (of course) different little people, a baby photo has always been, in my mind, fairly generic.

But now she’s a toddler, a little person who’s growing and experiencing more unique things, learning and trying and succeeding and failing in turn, like we all did growing up.  And while it’s impossible to unring the bell of having baby photos of her online, I can try to stick to what feels comfortable for us: gifting her with a minimal digital footprint when it comes to her story.  Of course, our family has a group story too, so there will probably continue to be the occasional photo.

Most of us live online to one degree or another.  I post my daily experiences of motherhood and personhood on Twitter and Instagram, I swap stories with other moms.  Unless we’re totally off the grid, it’s hard to not participate with leaving a digital imprint of some kind.  It’s difficult to gauge what it will be like for kids when they’re our age — will they have gone and dug up their early years online to erase them, or will they revel in having so many things documented for them — just as children are unique, the answer to that will likely be unique to individual children too.  There’s no way to know.  Maybe my child will miss out on memes in fifteen years that she could participate in if there were preschool photos of her on my Instagram — the Internet is weird.  You never can tell.

For now, I’m trying to conduct our mundane everydays online with a mind to what she might want later in life.  It’s not always easy to let the photos of my adorable ginger kid (which would get so many likes!) live solely on my phone and in our family yearbook albums.  But we have to start sometime, and toddlerhood seems as good a time as any.  Making the mundane decision every day to pull back is often boring and there are times I want to flood my feed with her cuteness. But if I don’t make it an everyday habit not to, how will I make it a lifetime habit?  As wonderful, lovely Annie Dillard wrote, how we live our days is, of course, how we live our lives.

So here’s to choosing the best path for your family, whatever that path is — whether it’s a choice about your family’s digital imprint, your child’s schooling, your household screen time decision.  More than anything, when I think about our decision, I think about how there’s not always a knowable outcome when it comes to picking a path at the fork in the road.  We make the best decisions we can for the unique kids (and partners!) we have.  We try to live our days the way we want to live our lives — respectful of our kids and their possible futures, while trying to balance our own needs and desires.