#alessiainthemorning.

Right after the new year, I noticed that Elise Cripe was posting pictures on her instagram with the hashtag #eliselovesmornings under a few pictures of things like coffee and her backyard. I thought this idea (like many of her ideas) was so cool. I spoke to R about it, and I said that I thought it's a pretty special idea to intentionally document your morning or any other part of the day in this manner. Then a few days later Elise posted about her hashtag and spoke about this book. Once I showed R the book, I think he was definitely on board with doing something similar to document our lives apart this year (hopefully only until July, and then we'll have shared mornings! Fingers crossed).

This year I have started a number of projects (project life, one little word) and am feeling really inspired to add more creativity to my plate, though the plate's pretty full already. That's why I thought jumping on this morning photo bandwagon would be an awesome, low key project. R and I have been 3,384 miles apart from each other most days of the year for the last five years. One of the things that bothers us most is that we wake up and go to sleep at different times because of the five hour difference, so we decided that seeing each other's morning is a pretty cool thing because we don't get to spend our mornings together before we go to work like normal couples. Since we decided on it together almost two weeks ago, R has been posting pictures of his morning on his instagram with the hashtag #richinthemorning (second and last photos above) and I have been posting on my instagram with the hashtag #alessiainthemorning (first and third photos above). I made sure that neither hashtag had any pictures under it, and then we were set (though now there is a random picture under R's hashtag of a mega millions ticket from 63 weeks ago. It's not him so it's annoying it didn't show up the first time I looked at the tag, but we'll work with it). I already love looking at both of the hashtags and seeing what we have so far. R isn't much of an instagram user, so I'm really proud of how much he's committed to it already (hopefully he'll keep it up. Rich, if you're reading this, ahem).

I think about R and myself finally living together and being a normal couple at least once a day. It finally feels like this may be our year, and I'm so excited about it. I made Rich a scrapbook for our first anniversary, and since then we haven't done much documentation of ourselves as a couple. I think it will be so great to put all of these pictures together at the end of our time apart and make our own little book: 3,384 Miles Apart. This isn't the height of my creativity as I'm piggybacking off a few different concepts and ideas, but this little mini personal project really spoke to me, so I'm super excited about it.