Tips for making the most of your parental leave

7. Take lots of photos and videos and back them up regularly!

We are lucky to live in an age where we have a camera and a video recorder sitting in our pocket. Capturing those special memories is so easy to do and will be so valuable to you and your children in years to come. Between the two of us, my wife and I took more than 15,000 photos in our child’s first year. This number significantly dropped when my wife went back to work leaving me with the main camera duties to capture special moments while she was away. But it has meant a lot to my wife when I have been able to send her a photo of something cute our child has done or footage of him mastering something new. While I had originally thought that sending these images to her while at work would make her sad that she was missing out, it did the exact opposite. At the end of the 12 months, we were also able to sort through all our photos and make a picture book of all the special moments captured in that first year, which also made great gifts for the grandparents!