Life in a Little Blue House: A Day in the Life

Have you ever seen the book "A Day in the Life of America"? Its a super cool concept book, where photographers across the country shot photos of random people doing random things on one random day. My parents had a copy when I was a kid and I used to love sneaking into the living room and flipping through the pages. I loved the voyeuristic nature of it, but also the greater idea that maybe our everyday lives are not as mundane as they appear at first glance.

A couple of weeks ago, I came up with this idea to chronicle a day in my life, as-is right now. There are a few thought processes behind this. One is that (although the days feel so, so very long sometimes) this period of my life is such a short season in the grand scheme of things that there's a very real possibility that I will look back in a few years and won't be able to remember much about what our days looked like. I want to document this so that I can have those memories. The second reason is that sometimes people who either haven't done the stay-at-home-mom gig or haven't done it in years and years might not know or remember what it looks like and might find themselves asking, "What does that chick do all day?!" And finally, for those who are in the throes of stay-at-home-momdom right now, I imagine it might be interesting to see what someone else's day looks like.

So, I set out to capture the little details of an ordinary day. I'm no Ansel Adams, but I tried to snap pictures that captured the essence of the key moments in our day-to-day life. I chose a regular Friday, where we didn't really have anything special on the calendar. Obviously, the day looks a little different if Libby has school or if we have a playdate or something. But I wanted to capture a super regular day, so a rainy Friday in March was perfect.

Here's a Day in Our Life:

5:45 am--Juliet wakes for early morning feeding. I feed her and put her back to bed, then crawl back into bed myself while Tom showers and gets ready for work.

7:30 am--Juliet wakes again, this time for the day. I feed her breakfast and make myself a cup of coffee.

8:00 am--Libby wakes up. I make her a cup of milk with Ovaltine and a bowl of oatmeal.

8:15 am--I try to accomplish something (like make a grocery list) and Juliet cries because I'm not holding her.

We play for a while. Juliet usually plays upstairs...

And Libby plays downstairs, because 99% of the time, she goes nuts if Juliet tries to touch her stuff.

9:00 am--Juliet goes down for her first nap of the day

I get a quick workout in, put laundry away and then shower while Libby watches TV. We don't do a ton of TV (most days, there's not any until the girls go to bed), but when I need to work out and shower, its a lifesaver!

11:15 am--Juliet wakes up, the girls play for a few minutes while I throw in a load of laundry

The girls get dressed (yes, its true--many a day, we aren't all dressed until almost noon)

11:45 am--Everyone eats lunch, I put on some makeup

12:15 pm--Put coats on, put the dogs in the laundry room, brush Libby's hair, load everyone in the car

12:30 pm--Arrive at Kroger and pick up groceries. Juliet is in the Ergo because she doesn't cope well with riding in the cart.

1:30 pm--Leave grocery store. Its raining, which makes for a super fun time of loading the girls and groceries in the car.

1:40 pm--Put groceries away, give the girls a snack

Take the dogs out because its too muddy to let them in the backyard, grab Juliet's sheets out of dryer and make her bed, help Libby with going potty and tuck everyone in for a rest/nap.

2:00 pm--Clean out fridge, check e-mail, check movie reviews to decide if the new Cinderella movie is appropriate for Libby to see, clean kitchen and living room, throw dog bedding into the wash

4:00 pm--Everyone's up from naps!

Tom gets home from work (have I mentioned how much I love the offseason?!). On Fridays, he picks us up coffee from Speedway on his way home...

We relax a bit and play with the girls

5:00 pm--Tom opted for the "pre-dinner" bath tonight. Sometimes we squeeze it in before dinner, but most of the time, we bathe the girls every other night after dinner.