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.

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.

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!

Can you believe we made it to the end of 202?! That’s cause for celebration! This is going to be quite the year to document. If you’ve been doing your roundups each month, it will be really easy. If you haven’t, that’s ok too. It’s never too late to start and the end of the year is a great time to do a roundup. There are tons of recap news articles out there that will help you list the events of 2020,

Before I get scrapping December moments and memories, I told myself I would get my November roundup completed. It helps me to set these types of mini-goals or conditions to hold myself accountable. November was definitely a tough month, but I’m so glad to have it documented!

Here we are at the end of November! That means it’s time to take a quick moment to pause and do a roundup of the memories and events of the past month. Use my simple roundup prompts to document the month so you don’t forget all that happened. It’s my favorite memory keeping tool and so many of my readers have made it a routine in their own lives as well.

Since it feels like we are already 10 weeks into November, I figured I should get my October roundup done. October was another crazy month for us as the numbers in Utah have spiraled out of control. We voted by mail-in ballot and took them to an official dropbox. We watched way too much news and lots of tv shows and movies. The weather was pretty nice most of the month so we took a lot of walks. We did have a record-setting cold spell and even a little bit of snow. We all got our flu shots and I got a pneumonia shot since I'm at risk with all my sickness last year and having diabetes.