This year, I am trying to better document the everyday, as the title of my blog indicates. I am trying to "cultivate a good life and record it" as my favorite scrapbooking guru says. As I believe that there are no boring lives, only boring people, I feel it necessary to record my not-so-boring life.
For years, I have wanted to hire a photographer to follow me around all day and snap beautiful photos of me and my family living our daily lives. I can not begin to imagine what it would cost to hire a photographer for 14 hours, so I am left to my own devices. I am doing better and better at photographing those everyday moments, but there is one part of my life that remains elusive to all but myself. It is that time that I spend by myself in my house while my children are at school. These precious hours of the day remain a mystery to my family, for they are completely undocumented...until today.
Since no one is here to snap photos of me during the day, I must snap photos of myself. Thank heavens for a timer and a tripod. I couldn't be bothered with composition or lighting in these photos. It was feat enough to get myself into the shots without cutting my head off. I chose today to document because I had nowhere to be and nothing in particular to do. I was slightly less productive due to the constant moving around of tripods and setting of timers and sprinting into shots, but only slightly less productive.
I was waiting to do this project until I lost 20 pounds, but considering my love affair with food and my fair-weather-friendship with the gym, the likelihood of this happening is remote. I have learned that life is short, document now. And since this little documentation is 99% for the benefit of my children, I have decided to keep it real. If the pictures contained a woman with coiffed hair and perfectly applied makeup standing in her spotless kitchen, I'm afraid my children would be puzzled. No, this is their real mother. The one they come home to everyday. This is what she really looks like, and this is what a day in her life really looks like.
After dropping off my last child at school, I allow myself 30 minutes at the computer. Thanks to my remarkable speed reading and skimming capabilities, I can scan over 7 or 8 blogs and facebook in this time. Now that I feel connected to the world, it's time to eat some breakfast.
This is me in my perpetually cluttered kitchen. I would like to say that you will see a picture of me shortly, cleaning this kitchen, but that would be a lie.
This is the breakfast that I have eaten everyday for at least ten years now. I love me a bowl of oatmeal. The almond milk and walnuts are recent additions. Notice that the almond milk is Unsweetened. Notice that there is a large sugar bowl sitting next to that unsweetened almond milk.
While my oatmeal is cooling, I put my eyes in. In a matter of two minutes, I go from 20 x 400 vision to 20 x 20. The joys of modern innovations like contact lenses!
I also make my bed.
Now it is time to eat breakfast. I am refraining from making self-criticising comments at this moment. That is Neil's sweatshirt from his mission I'm wearing. Suomi means Finland in Finnish. Well, it actually means Swamp-Land, but when a Finn says Suomi, he is referring to his country.
This is the time of year that I realize that it is nearly time for General Conference, and I have yet to finish reading last year's conference addresses. November's Ensign will be my breakfast reading for the next few weeks.
Yes, I keep the sugar bowl readily available as I eat my oatmeal. What is that yellow mug, you ask? Why it's a frosty mug filled with chocolate milk, of course! What else would it be?
Quite often, I finish breakfast, and can't quite put down the Ensign. This morning, a talk by Elder Christofferson was too good to put down, so I adjourned to a comfier chair to finish my reading.
Now it's time for scripture study. My bed offers the space necessary to spread out and study. I am currently switching off between studying the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Four Gospels. I am also trying to read the Church History student manual and Jesus the Christ. My goal is to read an hour a day. Sometimes I only get in a half an hour. And plenty of days, these books don't even get cracked, but the goals are there. Today, I managed 45 minutes in the book of Matthew.
I was pleasantly interrupted by a phone call from Neil. He was asking me out on a lunch date. I had intended to go to the gym, but did I mention my love affair with food, as well as with this remarkable man I'm married to?
"Hello, Gold's Gym? This is your fair-weathered friend speaking. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to cancel our date again! I know, this is two days in a row, but you see I've received a better offer. Perhaps we could reschedule for tomorrow, unless of course, Cafe Rio calls, at which point, I will have to cancel again."
I have a date in 30 minutes, and here I sit all greasy and grody. Time to hop in the shower. It's a good thing that vanity is not one of my weaknesses, and I can get ready in 15 minutes flat.
Neil and I dropped Jessica's cello and wallet off to her at school then enjoyed a delicious lunch at Kneaders. We shared a turkey, bacon, avocado sandwich and I tried the Italian Wedding soup. The soup grew on me...eventually.
I came home with exactly one hour to scrapbook before the kids started coming home. I am one of the last remaining non-digital scrapbookers in the world. We are a dying breed. Slouching at a computer for all of my memory keeping is not appealing. I found a great new scrapbook product line last year, that has solved my scrapbooking woes. I am 11 years behind on my memory keeping. This means that I only have about 12,000 photos sitting on hard drives waiting to be printed and placed into books for all to enjoy. Gone are the days that I spend two hours on one artistic masterpiece-of-a-layout, containing only two photos. I'm too busy cultivating a good life, and I need to record it in an efficient but visually pleasing way... enter one of my favorite people.
Becky Higgins, that guru I was referring to earlier, came up with a line of product that has enabled me to get hundreds of photos organized into scrapbooks with journaling and everything. It is amazing what I can accomplish in just one hour now. Today, I was working on 2008.
And then my highschooler walked through the door looking as stylish as ever. Since I was all about taking pictures today, I had to grab one of her. I love her unique style! She is just comfortable in her own skin and her own clothes.
And there you have it. That is what I did between the hours of 9:00 am and 2:30 pm. You may have noticed that, aside from making my bed, no housework happened today. Yeh, that's not unusual. A spotless house is not one of my priorities. One or two hours of frenzied cleaning each week tends to be enough to keep the house sanitary and clutter-free enough. Anything more than that seems like a waste of precious time and resources, but that's just me, remember we're keeping it real here. Is this a typical day, you might ask? This tends to be typical at least once or twice a week. Most of the other days, I'm grocery shopping, running to schools for various reasons, and doing my church calling. And there are always those "Super Woman" days, where I feel like I'm doing it all. But I try to get in at least one day like today every week.
I spend the time while the children are away feeding my soul, so that there's plenty of that soul to give to my family the rest of the night and the rest of the week. It is no longer a secret, what I do while Neil and the children are away. Now they know why I stare blankly when they ask me "What did you do today?" I don't quite remember what I did today. All I know is that I somehow feel ready for the mayhem of the evening. Let the chaos begin!
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