If you’re anything at all like me, you reach for the camera when something catches your eye – or your heart. A sweet little moment, amazing light, beautiful colours, whatever it may be. Collecting these images together, however you approach your memory keeping, is powerful and can be a comprehensive record of your life and what you’ve seen and done. What it might not do is reflect the reality of your day-to-day: your real life.

Any given day can include a myriad of moments and details that taken together form a rich picture about how you live your life. From your morning coffee routine to your child’s favourite storytime read, from your commute to the changing view outside your kitchen window. Capturing the ebb and flow of a normal day in your life can be a beautiful way to document the memory of this life – the here and now.

I have been super inspired by two projects that do exactly that: the Day In The Life mini album project by Ali Edwards, and the Day In The Life photo-essay project by Clickin’ Moms. I love this quote from the awesome series of tips from Clickin’ Moms:

There’s something remarkable about the power of a single photograph to tell an entire story … but don’t dismiss the distinct but equally compelling strength of the photo essay. Allow the images of your Day in the Life project to speak collectively, to build on one another, to relay context and details about your life that would be impossible to convey with a single image.

If you’re not up for doing a whole project, I think it would be pretty to incorporate this approach to memory keeping into your normal scrapbook style, whether you do page or pocket scrapbooks. All it takes is to either journal or photograph your normal daily routine, or to scrapbook a series of photographs taken on a single day that document that day in your life. I chose to document a single day, one of the last days I have multiple photos before my son was born. This layout made me think that this approach would be an awesome way to document the changes week to week or month to month during your pregnancy or over the first weeks or months of your child’s life.

 

 

You’ll find plenty of perfectly matched goodies in the TDP store to help you out – I used the gorgeous Daily Routine {Collection} from Anita Designs:

 

 

Make sure you check out our May challenge series in the forum that’s full of ideas for keeping it real this month. If this has motivated you to scrap a day in your life, our Document Your Days challenge starts May 6.
About the author: Kathryn Wilson shares her 1920s New Zealand home with her husband, her brand new baby boy, a wauzer, and a cavoodle. She is a photographer, and both a digital and hybrid pocket scrapbooker, who has lots of DIY projects she should probably be working on right now.