So this may seem a little out of place, but I promise, it fits right in.

Back in January of 2017, I stumbled upon an app via a photographer that I follow on Instagram. She had been using it for the past year to document her family's life, and at the end of the year, she had an awesome video full of memories with her family.

Now if you know me, I am all about documenting life in photographs. It is literally what I do.

I was curious, so on January 2nd, I downloaded the app 1 Second Everyday and got started. Over the last year, we drank a lot of coffee, traveled to Florida, Chicago, St. Louis, Palm Springs, and Paris; we've celebrated birthdays and holidays, we've dealt with our dog, Charlie, developing congestive heart failure and seizures, and we've enjoyed our normal day to day lives. But it so easy to forget all of the ins and outs of a year, which is why my husband have fallen in love with this app.

It's super simple. Within the app, you see a calendar. If the day is highlighted, you have pictures from that day that you can use. You tap the day, chose your image, select it, and you're done. And if you get busy and forget about it for 3 weeks, you can always go back and add your photos after the fact. What makes it even better (if you have an iPhone) is that it will pull from your Live Photos and use them as tiny little video clips. At the end of the year, it compiles everything into a video complete with the date (and optional notes) on each clip. 

And if you're like us, you can absolutely peek at your video multiple times throughout the year.

Or once a week.

Not that we did.

We weren't perfect. There were days where neither of us remembered to take a photo and (especially during the winter months) there were quite a few days that we only had pictures of Charlie (because we're crazy pet parents). 

These are by no means perfect portraits taken by a professional photographer (though we did that this year, too), but together they make an amazing time capsule of our year. 

It takes a little time to get in the habit of making sure that you intentionally take a photo each day (it's 7:45 and I just remembered to take one for today), but I cannot recommend it enough. 

Let's hear it! Are you going to jump in this year? Do you have other really awesome ways of documenting your life?