Raising your kids away from family can sometimes be heartbreaking. When you realize your parents won’t see her first steps or even her hundredth steps. Or that they’ll have to spend days getting comfortable with each other every time they meet. We certainly Skype a lot, but as a lot you know, if you put a toddler in front of a camera, the first thing they do is clam up and do their deer-in-headlights impression.

When Bean was very little, I yearned for a way to share all of her milestones and adventures with our parents and I think I settled on the perfect tool: cell phone video uploads to Dropbox.

Every day or so, I take a 30 second to 1 minute video of Bean doing her latest tricks, and upload them directly to a Dropbox account that I’ve shared with Dave and all of our parents. I also set up my phone to automatically upload any video I take to a second Dropbox folder — this is the folder I archive for my own uses. Of course, Dropbox only gives you a finite amount of free space, so I have to flush out the folders every couple months and save any videos to my own hard drive.

I can’t even express what a boon this has been to our lives. When I talk to my mom, I don’t have to give her updates on what Bean is doing; she already knows. She can jump right into a more in-depth conversation with me. Grandparents thousands of miles away have seen her first giggles and steps. They’ve heard her sing her ABCs and count to ten, and witnessed her hysterical halting toddler conversations. They’ve seen Bean blow out birthday candles within a matter of minutes or hours after it happens. Her first soccer scrimmage, her first attempts at sitting on the big girl swing, playing at the beach, petting goats at the zoo. Every day, Dave comes home and watches the videos of our daily adventures.

And, of course, now, I can look back through my archives and see what she was up to exactly one year ago today. It is truly amazing, and I feel so lucky to have them.