One of the biggest contributors to my personal story is memory keeping.
I love telling stories.
I love telling my kids stories. I love telling my family's stories. I love telling my stories.
I also love seeing the people, places and things we love and their part in our story reflected in our books.
I do this in a variety of ways. Through this blog. Through scrapbook pages. Through Photobooks. And through a couple of mini albums that I make each year. One in our week in the life album. And the other is the Daily December album.
The Daily December often serves to remind us of the traditions and stable things in our lives. The things we do again and again every year. Even though we live in a different place or have more kids or whatever- we still put up the tree, send Christmas cards and have advent calendars.
The Week in the life album is more likely to highlight the changes in our lives and the details. You can see from one year to the next that people have started school, left behind day time sleeps, matured in their habits and changed their reading materials.
You can also see what we have for dinner, what I keep in my hand bag, what cars we're driving and what our kitchen looks like on an average day. These are the sorts of things that change subtly over time- new patterns and habits evolve and old ones are left behind- for what ever reason.
It's nice to take a look at life in detail and close up so that you can appreciate the everyday things you might otherwise take for granted.
Each year that I do week in the life I try and remember to go back and look at the past years efforts. It's sometimes hard to look at a life overall and see what hasn't changed or what's going on that you don't like- but that doesn't mean it's not good to do it.
For me one of the toughest things about doing our 2013 Week in the Life in October (I'm writing this post restrospectively)- was how much the big kids weren't in the photos. They spend a lot of time at school obviously and we're not nearly involved there as we have been in the past. And being older they were not willing to take cameras to school to do their own documenting as they have in the past. But they also spend a lot of time holed up in their rooms not doing things with us- or even around us. Plus when they do come out and watch the TV we're more likely to go elsewhere and do something else - not being big fans of American football- you won't find us on the couch at 4am on a Monday morning with Kieran. And when Merenia is watching Horrible Histories in the evenings we're working on getting the small people into bed.
Recently I scrapbooked some photos that have been hanging around for 7 - 10 years. I did them fast and basic because I wanted them out of the envelopes they'd been sitting in and into albums where we can see them. While I'm glad to have them done I do think I've lost something in the intervening time interval from doing the activities to making the pages. And that's the raw unblemished emotion that came with doing the activities and being with the people. The details have faded and we've moved onto other things. So these things don't mean as much to me now as they did back then. The excitement of being on TV, of meeting an All Black and going on a flight that few people ever get to has been lost. The realisation that writing my stories as they happen so as to capture that information and that feeling that is lost over time is huge- and something I definitely want to remember.
Telling our story is really important to me and so satisfying creatively and mentally. Writing down the little things is one of the big things that makes my story so rich.
♥
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