Telling Our Story – Record Keeping

I’ve become a little bit obsessed with keeping a record of how we live our days.

It all started when Alma was a baby, and I got a keepsake calendar (affiliate link) like this one where I wrote down everything we did each day.  This calendar is great because it comes with milestone stickers that say things like 1st tooth, crawling, and waves bye-bye.  It’s great to have a record of when Alma reached these milestones.  It also helped a lot when I forgot to write these things down in her baby book!  I could just go check the calendar!

Of course, I had to get a calendar like this when Harriet was born.  These calendars are for the girls.  I write in second person, telling them what they did, how they were growing.  I’m sure they won’t be interested in reading these until they are a lot older, but I love knowing that their first years are recorded for them.

One way I like to keep track of my days is on index cards.  I’m sure I saw this on Pinterest or something, but the idea is you have an index card for each date, and over the years, you fill in what you do on each date.

I started doing this in January, but since I had kept track of every day in 2012 (Alma’s first year), I went back and filled in that year.  I also used my wall calendar (where I write down all our appointments, trips, sub jobs, etc) to fill in 2013 as well as I could.

I used a different color ink pad for the edges of each month.  I just grabbed the stack of cards for each month, and rubbed it along the stamp pad.

I love looking back and seeing what we were doing on this date last year, and the year before.  It’s always fun to see that I subbed at the same school, or that we went to the same park.  I love those little coincidences of the rhythm of our lives.

The last thing I do to record our lives is connected to my One Little Word of 2014.  My friend Katrina gave me this for Christmas.  It is just a blank for each day of the year.  Since I already use the index cards to record what we do, I wanted to find another way to use this gift.  I decided to write down what I’m grateful for each day. [I wrote a little more about this here]  I have really loved recording this bit of goodness each day.

I also really love when I see patterns develop.  I tend to be grateful for people, rather than things – I think that is lovely.

This brings us to how I do all this record keeping.  Here are my tips:

• Keep everything out in the open.  If I see it everyday, I’m much more likely to actually write down what we’ve done.
• Try to keep up.  If I do it each night, it makes my life much easier.
• If you miss days, don’t sweat it.  I usually can remember what we’ve done, or I can check with Jesse and he can help.  I have gotten about a week behind a couple times, and that’s difficult.  Sometimes I’m sure I’m not remembering everything we did, but I’m okay with that.