Mundane?

I had kinda gotten out of the habit of taking pictures with my real camera. It's so heavy, and my iPhone is always handy. (When I do manage to stray too far from it, Jericho is always kind enough to bring it to me. So I can't get away from it even if I try.)

At the beginning of the year I had posted about how I was trying to do a "Joy Dare", where I write down/take a picture of at least 3 things each day that I'm thankful for. I've been trying to make an effort to use my mark ii for that...because for some reason it just seems to show these gifts more in the way I actually see them...with depth and color and grit and life. So I've left it sitting out, on a shelf Jericho can't reach mind you, so it's easy to grab when it's needed. Miraculously, the older two have learned that you never never ever touch Mommy's real camera.

All of these shots are just some of the things I've noticed during our somewhat mundane, routine days. (I did have a bit of a meltdown about this exact thing this morning...Mondays and getting back into that "mundane" are just so hard sometimes. But I think the point of this noticing of the things around me is a way to break out of that. There is so much beauty in the everyday routine, and so much I skip over when I just focus on how if I pour one more glass of milk today...)

Noticing just how proud Tirzah is of her outfit...crazy leg warmers over pants and all, or how thrilled they were about our new printer and how it prints things from mommy's phone, or Jericho's constant ability to make us all lose focus on school and laugh...

Or Merrick's skinny white arms and how much he's grown, and Jericho's obsession with the vacuum even though he's really scared of it unless it's turned off, and those chunky legs sticking out of his diaper...(I'm soaking that up for now, since I'm going to try potty training him soon and that's a phase of his life we hope to be soon leaving behind)

And Tirzah's constantly crazy hair (static is not our friend)....and how one day she won't need me to keep brushing it out of her face (but I probably will anyway)...

And the fact that Billy cooks me lunch when he comes home for lunch...because he knows I haven't slowed down to eat more than a few nibbles of stuff leftover on kiddos plates all morning.

If I'm learning anything from this, aside from how much I love really seeing life through my camera, it's that if you're looking for the gifts you'll find them. Sure, it might be mundane to load nerf darts into Jericho's nerf gun 42 times today...but I'm grateful that he's here to ask me, and that he has siblings to shoot. That probably doesn't sound right...but if you know anything about this family, you get it. ;)