KIERAN HOWARD: We just can't stop taking snaps of our little Louie

I didn’t even know what a terabyte was until we had Louie.

Why do we take so many photos of our kids?

Understandably, we all want to document their early years.

But there is only a total of about 50 photos of me from when I was growing up.

Most of those are Polaroids, with at least two of me dressed up in girls’ clothing and another which perfectly captured me exiting our old outside toilet with my pants around my ankles.

No, I wasn’t 25 when that was taken.

My parents liked taking serious and meaningful photos for us to treasure in the future, as you can imagine.

I’ve probably only just got enough pictures of me when I was younger to fill one album.

In contrast, we’ve got enough photos of our boy to fill more than 500 albums – and that number is rising all the time.

At the last count, my external digital storage drive – correct me if that’s not what it’s called –had 8,048 photos and 460 videos of our 20-month-old.

Sadly, I’ve not made any typos there.

That is genuinely how many snaps we’ve taken of Louie.

To put it into perspective, he’s not even two yet and we could already have filled more than 200 of the old fashioned 36 exposure camera films.

Right now, we’re averaging about one photo for every hour that he’s awake.

People keep asking me if we still have dogs, because they don’t tend to appear in photographs quite as much anymore.

They used to ask Kerrie the same of me when we first got the dogs.

Now, I appreciate that those figures are just a little on the excessive side.

By my calculations – which, I admit, aren’t always that accurate – if we continue at this rate, we’ll have more than 85,000 photos and around 5,000 videos of him by the time he turns 18.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the first 3,000 photos of him, taken when he was a baby, had actually captured him with his eyes open every now and then.

Of course though, newborns tend to sleep a lot, but that didn’t deter us from papping him at will.

Another 3,000 probably contain some form of blurring too.

Toddlers don’t generally stay still long enough for a photo.

Anyway, I’ll ensure a year from now that I’m reporting a reduction in the numbers we’re taking.

MY BOY’LL BE A RECORD-BREAKER DAY

Kerrie keeps telling me I have quite big aspirations for Louie and what he might go on to achieve in life.

He had his first sight of a tennis racquet the other day.

I dusted off a couple stored in our shed. They hadn’t seen the light of day for about five years.

He only had hold of them for 10 minutes, but I’ve already since renamed Henman Hill, Louie Lawn.

And I’ve already got a vision of our future Murray being crowned Wimbledon champion at some point in the 2030s or ‘40s.

Mind you, he will have to learn that you can’t play with two racquets at once and that tennis balls are slightly smaller than footballs.

He was parading around the garden with a pair of Slazengers like an aircraft marshaller on a runway.

I’m sure he thought he was trying to direct a Boeing 737.

My high hopes for his future were evident again last week when we went swimming together for the first time at Gosport Leisure Centre.

His feet didn’t touch the bottom of the teaching pool without his head being under water, but I still returned home to excitedly inform Kerrie that he might one day be a world record holder.

I’ll be proud of him no matter what he succeeds in doing in life though, and that even includes him playing for Pompey.