The Refrigerator Door

Every once in a while I like to take a picture of the refrigerator door. I feel like it gives a pretty well-rounded idea of what life is like at that particular moment in our history; like a time-stamp of our days. The fridge door is where the pictures of the kids go, the shopping list, our little reminders, and it goes through various stages of cleanliness and organization as our lives together morph and shift.

Taking a closer look, you see the photos of Jacob, most of them older ones because things like that stopped being updated when Sabine was born. I only have a few tiny pictures of Sabine that were crafted together from the thumbnail size prints that came with my last order of photos. But I've got that bright orange pumpkin that Kate made us with Sabine's name on it. That makes me feel less guilty, that because he name is up there in print, she's an official member of our family. There's some other pictures: A couple of Marisa and then our dear friends, the ones we don't see as often and need reminding of what they look like! There's a to-do list of Zach's, odd jobs around the house. It's written on a dry-erase board because presumably those are the kinds of things that aren't going to have longevity on a list, but don'tcha know, they've pretty much become permanent words on the board. I should go back several months to the last time I got the fridge in a photo, I'll bet half those jobs were on the list then too. On the far left is the list I'm keeping of the foods I've introduced into Sabine's diet, the dates and her reactions (if any). You can tell I'm one of those anal moms (if you couldn't already tell that from the fact that everything on the fridge is straight and orderly).

On the bottom half of the fridge is my current favorite: The sign I made to keep Jacob out of the fridge. Time after time he's taken liberties with the contents of the fridge and it's ended in huge amounts of messes. I made that sign and told him no Jacob's allowed in the fridge. And more evidence of a baby in the house - the coin magnets we made are pushed to the top, out of reach of the littlest hands. Of course Mom's dry-erase board is the biggest, it's full of names of people that need to be called, and a list of things to tell Beckie next time I talk to her (because I have no short term memory anymore). Just below that lay the frustrated scribbles from Jacob. I wonder what thing I had just been yelling at him about when he did that particular doodle.

Taking a photo of the fridge is a way for me to mark the passage of time and show that life has been living itself to the fullest, but I also like to look at other peoples' fridge doors because I think it tells a story about their lives; it's somewhere you can go to get the little details of someone's life, to see who they really are. It's the one place in the house where you're not really trying that hard; you're not expecting people to go looking there to find out who you are, so you're not trying to be a certain way. This all makes me want to start taking photos of other peoples' fridges. So if I show up at your house and I happen to have my camera, don't be surprised if I ask to snap some photos in your kitchen. Just go with it.