Gather

 Gather Around the Table

Our first kitchen table was an old farmhouse table that we bought for (maybe) $50 from and antique store in Austin.   I remember that it was very expensive at the time.  We sat in two mismatched chairs that we purchased from a thrift store and we painted them two different colors. Years later when our children were old enough to move out of their highchairs we upgraded from that farmhouse table and bought a table and chairs from IKEA.  Originally, Amelia and Graham were sitting in booster seats attached to the IKEA chairs. Eventually the kids were upgraded to Tripp Trapp Chairs.  We recently repurchased the exact same table and 4 new chairs from IKEA as we had been really hard on that original IKEA table.  Our kitchen table gets used daily for meals but it also gets used for so much more.  It gets used for conversations, for homework, for art projects, for goop, for pumpkin carving, for birthday breakfasts and birthday cake, for coding, for gingerbread houses, for watercolors and much, much more.  It works comfortably for the four of us. It works tightly for six by bringing in two chairs from the dinning room table (which rarely gets used).  I had so much fun searching for pictures for this blog post. I noticed as I gathered pictures that I tend to take lots of close up photos with my macro lense. I wanted, with this project, to prove that we were actually sitting at our table and it was challenging to find pictures where I actually took a step back and included the big picture, all that was happening at a specific moment in time vs. a detail of what was happening during a given moment. I learned through this project that I need to step back and take "big picture" photos and also to continue zooming in and capturing those details.