Notebook Love: A week in the life

The notebook project I want to show you today was inspired by a blog I read occasionally:  Ali Edwards.  She’s pretty amazing at documenting life and does a project she calls A week in the Life where once a year (at a different time every year) she documents one week in detail with writing, photos, and scrapbooking–the everyday moments and ordinary routines of her family at that time in life.  I really love this idea because it focuses on capturing the routine things that are often overlooked in traditional record-keeping but in reality make up the bulk of our lives.  Isn’t it funny how we automatically do that?  Even when the bulk of my days were spent at work and/or school, I rarely mentioned in my notebooks what I was learning in class or doing at work.  Sometimes that’s just because our day-to-day schedules are boring or repetitive, but often it’s because we just don’t think to write those things down because they don’t seem significant.

So.  This project is kind of intense because the idea is pretty much to write down everything you and your family members do all day every day for a week–including the routine mundane parts.  Which, when you get down to the nitty gritty is a lot of things.  Ali’s turn out amazing and are full of beautiful pictures, but for me and this time around, I skipped the photo part except for a few I took with my Polaroid.

Housing my project is the very first notebook I made in my first bookbinding class.  Behold:

It was really a lot harder than I thought it would be to keep up on the thing the whole week, but I think it’s something that’s worth it.  Just carry it around with you everywhere and write something down every second you have a chance.  I wish my mom had something like this for me to look at from when I was a kid!  Showing the interaction between my siblings and I and just what we did on a normal day.

Like how Camryn and I spend a lot of time at the park on the swings:

Other tidbits from the week:

• Tanner rides the scooter to school even on really chilly days and always comes home with his glasses fogged up
• Camryn and I walk to the bank all the time because Tanner comes home with cash from his serving job
• Handing Camryn a giant leaf which she waved and waved around as we walked to the park in the baby sling
• watching the news together at night (hurricane coverage!)
• a list of the songs we sing
• us being really grumpy when Camryn kept us up all night
• our date night to a haunted house with free tickets Tanner got from his radio-DJ friend at work

And then, after that, even though I guess the point is to document a typical, normal week, our week descended into a very not a normal week as we dealt with a mouse fiasco clashing with a halloween. 

Sometimes, it was a little hard to write about such little things.  I’d start thinking, “this is so boring and no one is ever going to care or want to read this.”  But I really do think it’s worth it.  If I think back to when Tanner and I first got married, we worked at the same office and went to the same school and were literally together about 20 hours a day.  Our daily routine was soooo different than it is now and I think that will be something that’s fun to look back on as our family changes and goes through different stages of life.