Couch Potatoes

Sometimes I wonder if the word "Couch" is predominantly a southern thing. Seems like most people above the Mason Dixon line call it a "sofa". I grew up thinking that a "sofa" was some sub species of the couch, like a love seat or chaise. I remembering wondering once "I bet it's like a formal couch, one that rich people have in little rooms that people never sit in and that not child has ever pretended the arm of it was a horse." 

Couch just always had a more comfortable and less formal ring to it in my head. We had a variety of ugly couches when I was growing up, but they were all comfortable and cozy and were a great spot for a nap. No one ever cared what they looked like except my mother because we just wanted to sit on them, or lay on them, and our eyes were fixed on a magazine or a game-boy or the television. My mom could always find beauty in anything we had because she knew how hard she and my daddy worked for every single item in our home and if it was clean and well-made, it was beautiful to her. When I was younger, I thought that my mom just had really bad taste, but I *get* it now that I am older and I find that to be a very endearing trait of my mother. Our "stuff" was beautiful because it was the fruits of their labor. And not so much when my brother spilled his "magic coke" all over it(long story). But why all this talk about couches all of a sudden and out the blue, you might be asking yourself? Well, the idea of expressing how I feel about something so ordinary as the living room couch came about in a very ordinary way. If you happened to read the post just below this one, I had taken a picture of me and my children on our red couch a few days ago. It wasn't well though out as far as composition, I was having a bad day and decided to take a picture to capture the mood of that particular day. Well, I was looking at the picture again today and thought "I wonder how many pictures I have of a couch". Welcome to my world. I think random things. But this though of how often a photograph couches... it made me realize how big of a role our couch plays in our daily life and always has...literally all my life. Some folks trade in their couches every 2 or 3 years for something newer but when you have kids and you don't have a lot of money to spend on things like furniture, you hang onto something like a couch  until they kids or just daily life make it come apart at the seems. Then you stitch the seems back up by hand to try to squeeze just 6 more months of life out of it. It's simply not practical to buy a nice new couch that you have to cover in plastic to keep the kids from wearing it down. The couch is where they play, wrestle, eat popcorn on while watching an evening movie after bath time, where they fall asleep, where you spend hours with them in your lap when they are sick, where you sit down and unwind and snuggle with your spouse after the kids are in bed(or the other end of the couch) asleep. It's a central part of the daily routine and you don't want to stop life from happening because you have to keep your precious $1500 leather couch in pristine condition. 

So after sorting through all of those thoughts, I decided to do a new 30 day photo challenge centered around our couch. I absolutely understand why you are laughing in your head(or out loud) after reading that. It is an absurd idea, but I think it sounds interesting. I'm calling it "Couch Potatoes" because of the irony, and because it sounded better than "30 pictures of our couch". There is this stigma attached to the family couch. Kids who sit on it all day are playing video games and mindlessly watching TV and rotting their brains. The couch is for lazy people, where nothing happens except getting fat. But I don't see it that way at all and I want to convey just how magical and fun and exciting something so ordinary as your couch can be in the eyes of your children. I have the luxury of being able to stay at home with my children right now and I get to see every day how much fun they have on this old red couch where they spend so much time. I have no idea what kind of pictures you will be seeing. I am hoping that 30 days of photographing a couch will force me to get a little creative ;-) I started today, June 19th.

So without further ado...and without talking about everything I plan to talk about over the next 30 days....Here we go:

Day 1 of 30: 

"Afternoon Snack"

And the only spill was Liam dropping a spoon full of ice cream in his foot....which he promptly sucked off and ate like it never happened.