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.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m really working on adding more designs and tools to help myself and others document monthly memories. These also are great for daily, weekly, or any type of scrapbooking. I’m excited to share them with you! I also have a brand new free download for you so be sure to check out the entire post.

(And if you like free stuff, I’ll be including another gift in my newsletter so be sure you are signed up!)

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 realized the other day that the photo I’ve been using for my “about” page (now updated) was from 2016. Somehow, 2016 was six years ago! How did that happen? I decided I better update it with a new one so I took a quick selfie using portrait mode on my iPhone. I’m trying to be better about getting in front of the camera this year so it was a good exercise.

I feel like my year has gotten off to a slow start. My daughter and her husband got colds at Christmas and were unable to travel to see us for the holidays. They were well enough to join us on January 5th and we finally had our Christmas with them on that date. Then we celebrated a belated New Year’s on January 6th. Better late than never! I’m finding that the date on the calendar doesn’t mean that much these days. It’s more important to just enjoy the moments when you get them.

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!