Today, let’s think about dinnertime…is dinnertime as crazy at your house as it is at mine?

I’m proud to say that we have eaten a lot of dinners at this table as a family. We’ve tried to make it a priority and more often than not, we eat together…until this past year. Practices have gotten longer, games and other activities have cut into our time a bit, but we’ve made do. Sometimes we eat dinner at the pool in between practice and lessons. Other times we have brought food along to eat in the car on the way from one practice to another. My husband has missed more dinners than we would like to count with traveling and late work schedules. We have had to make adjustments, but that’s what life is about. Adjusting to our every changing schedules and the different seasons that we are experiencing. My days of each and every weeknight dinner at home with all of my family around the table may be over…which means that I need to soak up every single one that we get.

When I chose this as one of my topics for the month I realized that I love our time that we spend together at dinner but I don’t have very many images of our dinners. This time is spent talking and  hearing about everyone’s days…and it’s about math games. We have assigned seats at dinner and have since the first time that we sat at that table in this house. There are no more plastic plates at the table and we can all use big forks now…we all even get knives. There are no more sippy cups or high chairs and all of our feet can touch the ground…and we can usually go through a gallon of milk between the five of us at a meal.

I love my memories of our dinners and I wondered a bit about why I wasn’t really documenting them…there are several reasons. Take the title photo for this post – it’s grainy, the light isn’t great – dinnertime is not ideal for photography. Not super pretty photography anyway because it’s getting dark and I’m really just not a food photographer. I sometimes will take photos of the food that we eat or if we end up eating out, but I’m not usually taking photos of all of us eating. Who wants pictures of people eating? But I do want to remember this. Time is going by so fast. The days of my youngest sitting by my side at the dinner table with his hand on my knee as he eats just to be close are getting fewer and farther in between (he will lean on me every once in a while, and I love those moments). How long before they stop asking to play math games?

But how do you photograph that?

Sometimes you can’t visually document your days. You must tell the stories and have the photographs support your words.

Some things that you can photograph to document your dinnertime:

• who sets the table? do you eat family style with food in the center of the table or buffet style?
• what kind of place settings do you use? paper or cloth napkins?
• any special recipes that you make? any special utensils or pots and pans that you use?
• assigned seats or is seating a free for all?
• what beverages does your family drink with dinner?
• who clears the table? do the kids do the dishes?
• do you meal plan? how can you showcase this?

Take some time this week to think about your dinners…are they the same every night or do you live in the same mini chaos that I’m going through these days? Either way…document them.

This post is part of a 31 day series. Read the first post here about documenting everyday life and see a list of all of the other posts in the series.