I try not to make my blog posts all about me. Nothing is more boring than reading an article that starts and ends with nothing but an overshare of someone else’s personal life. But I’m working on a personal project this year, and thought it might tie in here every once in a while and still be relevant to you. Here’s January.

Please raise your hand if you found January to be longer than all of 2021. It can’t be just me. We arrived home from visiting family in Florida at 8pm on New Year’s Eve and stepped into January thinking it would be quiet and calm. But as much as we treat January as a do-over month, it isn’t one. There’s no life whiteboard that we can wipe off and restart fresh each January 1. Yes, we can try to make drastic changes in our life (one might argue that making drastic changes in the dead of winter isn’t the best idea, and really we should all be resting), but essentially, January 1 is the day after December 31. January is the month after December. And life goes on, forward, continuing the cycles and paths we were already on.

I decided on an ambitious group of challenges to start this year, including a challenge to take a photo each day ad infinitum. I’ve already been doing that since Memorial Day weekend, so keeping it going required very little extra effort. Again, not starting my life over from scratch here in January. Just continuing on, with a new number at the end of the date.

I wanted to share some of the photos that I thought made up January for us, some of the things I hope to remember about January 2022, when my kids were 2 and 3/4 (mid-month birthday), when we had a snowstorm and pink eye and Covid and we didn’t know when the month would end. These are the things that matter. The little moments, the daily activities that don’t mean much in the moment but make up an entire month, an entire life, when you look back. Life keeps moving forward, one step in front of the other.

Notice that my house isn’t perfectly clean in any of these images. I did not clean ahead of time (and often not after, either). Your family photos don’t have to be perfect, to perfectly reflect your life.

Want to see an example of an indoor family session where someone DID clean ahead of time? Check out this family session from November.