Self-imposed photo challenge

There are large chunks of my life that remain undocumented: no photos, no journal entries, no poems, no news stories written by anybody else. So many special moments and significant milestones were not captured partly because I was deployed and just missed them/couldn't celebrate them or because it never dawned on me that I would care to have photographs to remember those moments by later on in my life. This is something I've wanted to "fix" for a long time, and I think for the last year and a half I've made incredible progress. I also promised myself that I would capture more ordinary moments that weren't in and of themselves considered "beautiful" or extraordinary, but that I would be grateful for having later on in my old age. I look back on what few photos I do have of a certain decade, and I wish I would have had more photos of myself wide-eyed, younger, and makeup-less. I also wish that I had snapshots of what my life was like at any given time in that decade, and I don't: what I liked to eat, how I dressed, what my home looked like, where I lived, who my friends were, things I saw. While this is something that is small in the bigger scheme of things, it makes a huge difference in the quality of my life now and satisfies my need to be creative. And so I go forth, capturing ordinary moments, which are few and far between for someone with a life like me. Yet at some point those ordinary moments will turn into ordinary days, and then months, and then I will miss the camaraderie, the service, and the purpose that made those ordinary moments so fleeting and rare.

a list of moments I would like to capture this year: 

1. just getting out of bed

2. the refrigerator fully stocked

3. my paleo journey (daily/weekly/monthly)

4. our bedroom on a Sunday morning

5. the medicine cabinet

6. the junk in my (car) trunk

7. a day at the dog park

8. having a picnic

9. a good book i read

10. my closet

11. what I looked like (every month of this year- Jan)

12. the pantry

13. my typical running outfit

14. my birthday

15. our 5th wedding anniversary celebration (if one of us is not gone)

16. our 3rd year in our house

17. where I write

18. the happiest moment of the year

19. times spent at home in L.A. (at least 10 photos for this year)

20. people I've served with (definitely lacking these photos)

I tried a 30 day photo challenge and almost fell short, and I know I can't handle a 365 day photo challenge with the type of demands I have in the military. This will have to do.....