How would it feel to watch yourself grow up?
This is a question Mackenzie and Madison Scruggs — one a Grand Canyon University graduate and the other an incoming freshman at the university — have been able to answer.
Their father, Silverdale, Washington, resident Kevin Scruggs, interviewed them every year on their first day of school until they graduated high school. He combined the clips into heartwarming viral videos to celebrate their high school graduations.
Scruggs said that he began filming his daughters because he wanted to commemorate the important moments in their lives.
“I love being a dad, and I’m sentimental, so I was just thinking as they’re going off to school, I wanted to just capture it,” he said. “Life’s about moments and capturing those moments.”
Because he began filming his daughters before there was social media or YouTube, Scruggs said, his original purpose to his back-to-school interviews was “just for enjoyment.”
However, these interviews, which were compiled into videos to show at the girls’ graduation parties, went viral — Mackenzie’s back in 2017 when she graduated, and Madison’s over the course of a few days.
The videos — which begin in first grade for Mackenzie, now 20, and kindergarten for Madison, 18 — feature both girls speaking about a range of topics — the contents of Madison’s locker (lip balm, dry shampoo and more), Mackenzie and her dad discussing scouting out cute boys and more.
Mackenzie’s video, which went viral when it was posted for her graduation back in 2017, has more than 2 million views on YouTube. In just a few days, Scruggs said the video was the number two trending video on YouTube, second only to a movie trailer.
“We were just blown away by that,” he said.
Meanwhile, Madison’s video, which was just published last week, has been more of a “slow burn,” Scruggs said. It just recently hit over 100,000 views on YouTube.
Though Scruggs hired someone to help edit and produce the videos, he said he participated in the planning and orchestration of the production, calling the video production a “collaborative effort” between him and the producer.
Mackenzie graduated from Grand Canyon University in April with a degree in Business Management, and Madison will begin her freshman year at GCU in the fall. Scruggs said that having his daughters attend a Christian college was a priority for their family.
“When we started down this journey, we said to the girls, your first year of college we really want you to go to a Christian college your first year,” Scruggs said. “We’re followers of Jesus and that’s … the biggest part of our lives.”
Scruggs added he believes the sunny Phoenix weather might have influenced their college choice.
“We live in Washington and the weather up here isn’t always the greatest, so the winter sun of AZ was appealing,” he said, in a phone interview with The Arizona Republic.
Scruggs said he enjoyed getting to bond with other parents who have viewed the videos and hear their stories about making memories with their children.
“It’s been fun to share it with the girls, but also I get the chance to talk to other parents and that’s really neat, to just interact with other parents,” Scruggs said. “We’re all in the same boat, the same journey, we love our kids and there’s a lot of parents out there making memories with their kids and doing cool things. And I’m just fortunate that mine somehow caught the interest of people and they thought it was a cool thing to see.”
Scruggs said he is thankful that through his videos going viral, he is able to share his love and pride in his daughters with the world.
“As a dad, I’m grateful that people are able to see how amazing our girls are. I’m just a giant fan of both of them. I’ve loved being a dad, I’ve loved every day of their lives and their mom and I couldn’t be more proud of them.
If it brings a smile to someone’s face that they get to watch that, that’s icing on the cake, because they’re pretty amazing kids.”
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