Another roundup completed, and I love the month-in-review approach more than ever! If you aren’t familiar with my monthly roundups, be sure to check out this post. There is even a video tutorial included! I had a lot of stories to tell from January, so my pages have a lot of journaling on them. Those are my favorite kind of layouts because I love including so many details that I know we will all be grateful for when we look at these pages in the future.

I’ve been reading your feedback (thank you!) and working to make the monthly roundup even better and I’m really excited with how everything has turned out! This is my 17th (SEVENTEEN!) year of doing monthly roundups. I started this routine in January of 2006 and it’s my most useful tool for meaningful and easy memory keeping.

When the new year hit, I knew that one of the projects I really wanted to tackle was to make my habit of doing a monthly roundup even better. I wanted to provide the best designs and memory keeping tools to help others embrace this really accessible way to document their lives.

Do you ever have a big idea that keeps going and going? That’s what my design brain has been doing lately - just pumping out the ideas! I’m working on a bigger (and yet more simple) approach to my monthly roundups and suddenly, a brand new collection came to life. So fun!

Now that we are a few weeks into 2022, it’s a good time to think about how you want to approach memory keeping for the year ahead. You don’t have to have a full fledged plan at this point, but it’s nice to think about some general ideas.

I don’t really feel ready to start the new year until I get my last roundup done from the previous one. It felt good to finish up December of 2021 and know that I did a roundup (and scrapbook pages) for every single month last year! This is a habit that I love so much and that really makes my memory keeping a lot easier.

Here’s what our December looked like:

We made it through another year! If you’ve been doing roundups all year long, this will be your final one of the year and you will be all ready for a year-in-review album or journal entry. December is so rewarding for the roundup schedule because even if you haven’t been doing them each month, you can still take this as an opportunity to reflect on the year that has just ended. There are tons of recap news articles and Best/Worst lists for the year. Be sure to save those and use them in your journaling!

I’m personally grateful to be at the end of this calendar year and to turn a new page into 2022. Here’s hoping it’s full of health and happiness!

Now I’m ready to use my roundup prompts to document the month. I also love creating scrapbook layouts using these topics, but there is no right or wrong way to do this. Just record the main events of November and find somewhere to share and enjoy them!

I happen to love year-end reviews because they give me so much material to use for recording our memories of the year. Of course, they are a lot more fun to read when the news is better than it has been over the past year, but it’s still important to take some time to reflect on what has been happening around us in the world. It’s also a great way to jog your memory to think about what was happening in your own life that coincided with these events. I’ve been saving links to some great resources as I find them, and I will continue to update this list if I see anything else worth adding.

What do you do to celebrate New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day? We don’t usually do anything too major, but I kind of enjoy that. Our big focus is mostly on having good food to eat. lol! Since New Year’s is just a few days way, it seems like a good day for a blog post all about how to make New Year’s celebration fun and memorable!