Photographing My Exciting Life as a Stay-At-Home Mom
As per my 4 Simple Goals, I carried my camera with me all day yesterday. Turns out? I don’t do a lot of exciting things and I don’t go to a lot of photographic settings. However, the challenge of just photographing the mundane turned out to be quite an exercise in and of itself. It was quite fun to see my daily activities become subjects of my own photography. These photos are all Straight Out Of the Camera (SOOC) and I think quite a fun look at my day.
Nikki deciding to carry this picture with her to school because…I have no clue. She just found it and decided she wanted to carry it around. It would be sweet except she kept saying, “I want it to remember you by.” And that totally creeped me out.
Breakfast table reading. He says, “Chicka Chicka 1 2 3!” whenever he “reads” this book.
Our morning ritual: Call the neighbor’s cat over and give him some love before taking everyone to school.
Waiting for E to get to the van.
After getting E to school and Nikki to Pre-K (halfday), Wes and I spent the morning running errands. When we got home it was time for my a.m. project (the project I try to complete before picking up Nikki from Pre-K) – putting together a collage frame for the kitchen. I got out the photos and the frame I had bought a while back and went to work. Here is the final product:
And here are a few pictures of the chaos Wes caused while I worked on this project. Keep in mind, the kitchen floor had nothing on it when I started this project. This is the plight of the SAHM…any single project to give you a sense of accomplishment for the day, creates more projects that you had no interest in dealing with. Like putting up the mess your kid made while you worked on your project. It took me 20 minutes to put together the frame, and 20 minutes to put up all of the stuff Wes got out while I put together the frame.
Then I had to meet LilZ before he went out of town for a concert and then pick up Nikki from school. Came home and put the kids down from their naps and did my best to find interesting things to photograph around my own home. Well…you can see how THAT went.
After naptime we had to go pick up a friend from the local middle school. We brought her back for some playroom time where I took a few more photos before calling it a day.
All in all it was a fun day. I think I’ll try to pick a day next week that has me in different places than my own home, which is where I already take 90% of my photos anyway. But, that was a challenge to do more than say, “Smile!” to my kids in my home to make a cute picture. It also turned out to be a neat way to document my day. What seems mundane when I talk about it looks kinda cool in photo form.
Plus, what’s mundane now will be memories later. You’ll look at these photos and say, “Oh, remember when he read Chicka Chicka at the breakfast table?”
You got some great photos!
I agree with ccr; you want to capture all kinds of memories… those at home with family, not just special occasions out.
The frame looks great! And it’s so cool to just see how things develop (ha.ha. pun actually unintended, if you can believe that) when you carry your camera with you all day. I think you did well – and just think, you’ll get better and better, too!
My same-age son Thane was wearing the exact same shirt as Wes yesterday. Target ftw. Sadly, my camera doesn’t do aperture, so my snapshots are never more than that. Yours are lovely. I particularly like the magnet picture.
I did the 365 self-portrait project in 2008. A lot of the pictures felt so boring and staged to me at the time, but looking back at them it is an amazing project. I not only got to see myself change over the course of the year, but I took a TON more pictures in general, because I always had my camera in hand. During that year my oldest grew from a baby to a toddler, and I got pregnant and had my second daughter, I changed jobs, my husband went from a stay at home dad to a workin’ man, and I recorded it all. It was also one of our most tragic years (due to a few really bad events), so some of the pictures are painful to look at, but it is still a wonderful gift that I gave to myself, recoding all of those “mundane” moments.
Cute pictures! I read your website every day, but never comment. I just have to ask…. WHERE did you find those adorable hole punches? Those are too cute!