Project 365: 2015

In 2012 and 2013, I took on Project 365, a photography project that entails taking a photo each day to document  the year.  At the end, I ordered beautiful photo books from Artifact Uprising  and couldn’t have been happier with the outcome. The girls still get such a kick out of curling up on the sofa and flipping through the books and so do we.  There’s something awesome about making it a daily ritual to find beauty in your everyday routine.  When it all comes together and you can flip through a full year of those moments and see the seasons change and the baby fat disappear from the baby’s cheeks–When you see how much laughter and how much snuggling was squeezed into 365 days,  well, it’s hard to not be overwhelmed with gratitude for how good you have it, no matter what else that year may not have gone as you’d hoped or planned.

After 2 years of Project 365, I switched gears last year and  decided to do 52 Portraits of each of my girls. It’s all done now and I am in the process of sorting through the photos and organizing them so that each girl will have a book that tells the story of their 2014. What this means in reality is that I’m spending a lot of time on the couch turning my laptop towards my husband and saying, “Aww, look at this one! Remember that one? Look how little they look!”  It’s possible that it may be a while before I get to the actual book ordering but that’s okay because part of the reward of the project is that  I have this visual diary of their change and of all of the moments that made me want to grab the camera and freeze time.

I loved doing 52 portraits and focusing on the story of each girl as an individual but  I learned that without the goal of 365 photos, I was more lazy about pointing my camera at my own family. It’s true that we moved and that our spring and summer were a more than a little bit thrown off  by my husband’s extended illness.  Maybe I would have failed at a Project 365 last year anyway with all that we had going on. But I see now that the act of doing the project in 2012 and 2013 sharpened my awareness of the life that I am living and of the countless little moments that are worth savoring. Even if I’d never done a thing with the photos, the intention each day to look for the beautiful stuff, the hilarious stuff, and the bittersweet stuff that we are surrounded by–that intention alone made my life better.

I went back and forth on the idea of taking on Project 365 again this year. Life is only getting busier with Zoe in school now along with Girl Scouts, gymnastics, soccer and the world of play dates. I wondered whether I could truly keep up with it and knew how  frustrated I know I would be if I started it and then missed a day or 2. In the end, it came down to the fact that I’d rather aim for something that was so good for me before and risk doing it imperfectly than miss out on the joy that the project has brought me before.  The book at the end of the year is the icing on the cake but the day to day reminder to appreciate my gloriously imperfect little world is priceless.

Here are the first 8 days. I will be uploading these on Instagram daily and to Facebook as well but amazingly, the first week of 2015 pretty much flew right by.