I’ve been thinking about why I love documenting memories so much and it has a lot to do with my love of creating memories. They go hand in hand for me. If I’m going to put in the work to create some special memories, I want to make sure that my family and I remember them. I’ve been trying to find a hashtag on Instagram where I could connect with others who love creating and documenting memories as much as I do and I’ve had a hard time finding the right one, so I created my own. I’m going to use #createanddocumentmemories when I post about making or recording memories. Feel free to use it as well. I’d love to develop it as a community!

I finished my February 2021 roundup and it feels good to have a new page for our family records. This is a great format for me, but there is no right or wrong way to do a roundup. I even shared a GIF template in my Instagram stories the other day and quite a few people enjoyed using that for their roundup. I’ll share that later in the post.

I usually tweak the roundup graphic a bit each year and I think this is my favorite one so far. Feel free to save it for your own use. I’ll post a new one each month to remind us all to document our everyday lives.

Whether or not you follow my monthly roundup prompts, I hope you have a system for documenting the details of your everyday life. It might seem overwhelming during a busy month or boring during slower times, but it’s worth having some systems in place to help you capture the details.

Here are a few of my suggestions to make documenting an easy part of your routine.

I think this was the most difficult roundup I’ve ever done. Life has been hard to document over the last year, but this was a particularly scary month in the United States. I couldn’t exactly leave political events off of my recap and I wouldn’t want to do that. I also needed to be sure they were recorded in a way that will be suitable for all viewers of my album. I plan to do more journaling of the events that took place, but won’t be sharing those publicly.

I hope that by sharing my approach, it will make it easier for you to decide how you want to do your own documenting.

Now that January has (finally) ended, it’s time for my list of roundup prompts. Before I put them all together on a reminder graphic, I wanted to check in with all of you about roundups in general.

You’ve probably seen the templates that I have designed for digital scrapbooking. I use them all the time for scrapbook layouts, but I was so excited when my daughter Riley used one to create a vision board for her 2021 goals.

I finally got all of my Christmas decorations put away yesterday so it feels a bit bare around here, but also fresh and clean. So far, the first few days of January have mostly been about working on unfinished business from last year. I cleaned up Christmas, cleaned out the fridge, and completed my December roundup. I also tallied up our stats from the year (husband’s travel, Jazz games attended, etc.) which didn’t take me very long since most of that all stopped last March. I also put together a year-end recap page. It feels so good to get these tasks done!

We start off the calendar year with a brand new slate for telling our stories so it’s a natural time to make some decisions about how to document our daily lives. While I do want to emphasize that we don’t have to have everything figured out for the entire year as of today, it’s also a good time to consider some overall approaches as some of them depend on daily action.