Once Upon a Photo

It sounds so cliché, but I truly can’t believe we’re in 2009 already. It seems like just yesterday that we were celebrating the new millennium in Park City with a 5 month old Abigail, and having a major freakout (me)  / celebration (Neil) over the news that I was pregnant again.

I won’t be making any New Year’s resolutions, since those are pretty much guaranteed to be ignored after 2-3 weeks of rigorous stick-to-it-ness. But I would like to blog more, and scrapbook more, and play more games with the kids, and read more books.

One thing I would like to commit to is taking a photo a day in 2009 – Project 365. It’s not so much the number of pictures that’s intimidating (I took over 700 this past December – about 3 were decent), it’s the task of remembering to pick up the camera every day and photograph something of interest. Or something boring – whichever.  I’m not picky when it’s 11:59 PM and the leftovers from dinner are the most exciting thing around.

I’ve done the photo-of-the-day thing before (back in October ‘07), and when I look back at those pictures now, I especially love all the little things I documented – Travis’ “sound survey” from school (where he noted that he heard me talking on the phone every day), the glistening spider web in the school parking lot, and Abby’s face paint from kids-eat-free night.  It was a nice little slice of life. Of course, I would have documented the big events – Elaine’s wedding and Halloween – anyway, but I probably wouldn’t have bothered with all of the random pictures of naps and trips to the park. The spiderweb would have been appreciated in the moment, and forgotten about by the next morning. Now I’m really glad I made that trip back home to pick up the camera.

The nice thing about having kids, especially anal ones like Abby, is that they tend to remind you incessantly about your commitments. She asked every day what I was posting, and there were a few times where we were scrambling right before bed, looking for something to take a picture of. I haven’t told her about this project yet, because I’m hoping that I won’t need to be nagged at least for another week or two.

I definitely won’t be blogging every day, but my plan is to do a “catch-up” post every so often (weekly? maybe more?) and post the daily photos all at once.  They may or may not have captions or explanations or apologies. And sometimes, if I feel like it, I might just post more than one photo a day. Something like this:

Day 1: Jan 1 2009

We spent the last week at Larry’s ranch in the middle of nowhere (about halfway between Del Rio and Rock Springs). There are thousands of acres of hills, rocks, cacti, mountain laurel, deer, and about 12 people. My dad would love it. Actually, we all love it.

Moose is a huge weenie and was less than thrilled with the fireworks (he climbed up into Larry’s lap at one point – the 100 lb. lap Lab), but he relaxed after we gave him some Tuaca.

On New Year’s Day we rode around the ranch, took the kids down into the cave, and extracted what surely must have been the world’s most painful cactus needle from Travis’ big toe. It took pliers to pull the thing out, and I think our ears are still ringing from the screams.

Needless to say, he recovered after a few minutes, and was happily bouncing along in the back of the Ranger.

Day 2: Jan 2, 2009

Our family plays a lot of games – board games, the dorky kind. We try to play something every night, but get sidetracked occasionally by school and sports.  Lately the kids have been more interested in having me read to them (currently, The Mysterious Benedict Society), which is fun too, but I’ve been missing our game nights. We got Settlers of Catan for Christmas (To: Mom  From: Mom), and cracked it open before we left for the ranch. It’s rather complicated to set up and to figure out the rules (Travis was standing on his head and running laps around the dining room at one point while I was reading the directions aloud), but fun to play once you get it all straightened out, since each player is involved for every roll of the dice. We had to stop mid-game when we left, and finished it up Friday night once we got home.

Day 3: Jan 3, 2009

Normally I’d say that it’s a bad idea to play on the trampoline with the sprinkler in early January, but it got the kids out of the house.  Did I mention it was 83 degrees today? Jan. 3. Seriously.