I’ve never been so invested in someone else’s bowel movements and feet until I had my son.

The former keeps me on edge because I want to make sure there aren’t any health problems for which I’d likely blame myself. And those feet, those chunky little feet and cute toes, didn’t start keeping me up at night until recently.

Raising a kid is all about timing. And that sent me falling down a rabbit hole racked by questions: When is the best time to get him shoes? What if I mistime his introduction to shoes and he curses me in a therapy session 20 years from now?

Also, how am I thinking about shoes already? I feel like I just had him.

I temporarily evaded the chaos in my mind by going to the people who have done this whole parenting thing long before I did. Not only did I find a bit of calm, but I discovered Van Dyke & Bacon Shoes is the place I needed to go.

My mom gave me my old Stride Rite baby shoes, now weathered with browned hard bottoms. But there’s a discrepancy: My mom says she doesn’t know where they came from, and my dad insists they were from Van Dyke and Bacon.

Nevertheless, I followed my dad’s recollection and pursued the tradition.

I admit a part of me was putting off getting these shoes. There is a reality that every day my son Jazz grows even further away from the 8-pounds-and-15-ounces newborn I first met in July.

There will be a day when he only needs me to take him to the store to buy the shoes, not to help him walk in them. Then it’ll just be money for the shoes, no ride. And then, none of the above.

Those days are far from now. But every step toward the shoe store, I felt even closer to the saying many parents have shared with me: “The days are long and the years are short.”

Generational shopping isn’t a surprise to John Bacon, whose grandfather helped start Van Dyke and Bacon in 1938 with its first store in Baltimore on North Charles Street. John and his brother, Marty, run the business now as part of the fourth generation of their family. John Bacon said he recently waited on a woman who used to bring her now 35-year-old son into the store when he was a kid; she was now shopping for her grandson.

“We just owe Baltimore a thank-you,” said Bacon reflecting on the business’s history.

The selection in the store was simple enough. I watched as my son’s eyes explored the room where employees kneeled at customer’s ankles, measuring and fitting their feet.

I wasn’t sure how he’d react when we picked out a bright white pair. But he surprised me, sitting calmly in my lap with my husband beside us as an employee put his little foot against a metal ruler. The moment he stood in the shoes, he started to tip-tap the soles against the carpeted floor and then pull at the laces.

Milestone reached. Tradition carried on.

Years ago, I cherished the little traditions of my childhood like visiting a neighborhood Blockbuster (RIP) on Fridays for pizza-and-movie nights. Or “Daddy’s Delight,” the sundaes my father would make when my sister and I visited Baltimore for the summer from Los Angeles.

Now I’m tasked with creating new traditions for my son. Selfishly, I think they will help me preserve the moments that are quickly fading into memories.

Of course, I’m not alone. Katy Meacham also plans to share the nostalgic days of her childhood with her 6-month-old son Oscar.

She’s looking forward to taking him to Orioles games where she developed a crush on Brady Anderson as a kid and had special nights out with her dad. Then there are the summer vacations in the Eastern Shore where they crabbed throughout her youth and adulthood. Her mother and grandmother made the same trips before her.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the places I grew up going to aren’t here anymore,” Meacham said, recalling the Chili’s her family went to in Belvedere Square before the restaurant closed in 2000.

For Lisa Lawson, a home of one of her childhood traditions isn’t gone, but modernized. Lexington Market, one of the oldest markets in the country, has been renovated since Lawson’s early days.

“We have a new market, but it’s nothing compared to the original,” Lawson said, remembering its heady scents of raw food waiting to be cooked mixed with those of tasty treats ready to be eaten.

Lawson has vivid memories of getting to the market at 7 a.m. with her mother and grandmother to stock up on food for the week. For her, it was a sweet and full-circle moment to show her daughter Camille the space today in order to broaden her understanding of the city around her.

I’m not too proud to admit that even though my husband and I are the parents, our son is teaching us something new every day. Along the way, I’m walking him into a place of my old memories so he can create his own. His new shoes are a soft and surreal reminder that he’ll continue to step out into the world, with laces tied or not.

For now, I’ll let my traditions — which are now his, too — serve as an antidote to time’s thievery. In our shared ritual, I feel newly anchored to moments that passing time can never erase.