Making Life Rich

I've undertaken a project this week.  A week-long photographic documentation of our lives, that will be put together in scrapbook form, sometime in the near future.  I was inspired by the very inspiring Ali Edwards, and in this case I've taken her idea and tweaked it a bit.  My book will be 100% digital.  I find the process of creating a digital book to be more streamlined and simple for me.  It's also significantly less expensive than traditional scrapbooking.  Instead of bits of daily ephemera I've decided to supplement my good-camera photos with camera phone snaps, and photos that the kids took with our old point and shoot camera to give the finished product a more homey, eclectic feel.

So that's what I'm doing, and since it's my last day of full-time camera toting, and tomorrow I'll be icing my sore wrist (that thing is heavy!) I've been reminiscing.  Through this week I've had a chance to observe myself and learn about how I live now - and how I can live in the future.  This opportunity to learn came partially because full-time life documentation causes you to kick bad habits to the curb, stop sweating the small stuff, and just make life a little more interesting.  In this case it started because this week will be permanently remembered in a book - but it ended up shining a light on things for me. 

I realized: I CAN LIVE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME!

We can go to the children's museum for an hour, before running harried afternoon errands. 
We can bake cookies after dinner and eat them while they're still warm. 
I can let the kids assemble their own pizzas, rather than doing it my way. 
We can rent a 99cent movie and have more fun together watching it than we would have had at the movie theater. 
We can have tea together and let the day's noise just fade into the background.