A Note on Documenting Life

When I started this blog a billion years ago (okay, only 15 years ago…but whoa that’s a very long time), it was to share bits and pieces of my life as I traveled around the world. I never imagined a time when we’d share so much of our lives on the internet, but here we are, Instagramming our coffee on the daily. While there are certainly aspects of this that aren’t appealing, one part I do love is finding new and interesting ways to document the life of my little family.

Sometimes, when we are laying in bed, my 8-year-old will beg me to get out my phone and pull up old blog posts with videos from his babyhood. They always make us laugh and I’m constantly reminded how much I wish I was really documenting the little, in-between moments. It’s almost like now that I have a video recorder at my fingertips every second of the day (hello, iPhone), I forget to use it unless I’m being intentional. Almost as if now we know it’s a GIVEN that so much of our lives will be documented online, so we forget to capture those moments that won’t gain us Facebook likes or retweets.

Last year, in an effort to record and remember the mundane and beautiful moments that happen when social media isn’t watching, I made a goal to complete one full year using the One Second Everyday app. One Second Every Day is an app where you can record one second of video for each day, and then it will mash the clips together in a video supercut. In years past, I’ve attempted to utilize One Second Everyday, but I usually burned out after a month or two. However, 2018 was MY YEAR to make it finally happen…and I did!

But then I never shared the final product on the blog. I mean, points for effort, right?!

Well, better late than never, so I’m super excited to share the video with you today. Some of the clips are of huge moments like lobbying for foreign aid in Washington DC or the kids jumping off cliffs at Tablerock Lake, while others are what could be considered mundane (yes, there are a lot of clips of our animals…). Regardless, I love how the entire video turned out, and it was incredibly fun to watch this back with my family and remember what an incredible year we all had together.