My family was having fun with an email thread about keeping a journal and the different ways to do it. My sister, Becky, has a lesson on Sunday and was asking for input. Another sister, Emily, sent us some journal entries from our Grandfather. It is really great to read the journal entries from him. They are a log of costs of things and actual events. Everyone keeps journals or family histories a little differently.
Some ideas from our emails:
Keep a steno pad by your bed for each child so that you can write down the events for them or your thoughts about them.
Keep photo albums and add some comments about the pictures and events.
Keep a family blog.
Take your pictures and entries from your blog and publish them in a family book.
Make videos of events and then put them on disks or keep them for the family.
Keep your own journal and record things in there about family events and your feelings and thoughts about the people in your life.
Make mini photo albums for children to see their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, etc. You can take that in the car or to church or wherever and you have a great memory maker for them early on.
Keep a journal next to your scriptures and books you're reading so that you can record your thoughts as you read certain things that influence your life and impress you.
Our brother, Jonathan, got into the terms "journaling" and "scrapbooking" and stuff so we had some fun with the words. I loved the play on Journaling that they did in the emails. It made the word "Journey" come to my mind. Now I think I have a whole new perspective. I think that the word must come from keeping track of journeys. So that being the case or at least for me, I can see that keeping a record of my journey (including events and opinions, feelings and inspirations) and the early journeys of my kids is worth a lot to someone, even if it's my children and their children and not me. I really find a huge amount of value in the journal entries that my Mom and Grandparents had. It shows their style of writing and their thoughts and exposes their character traits. I'd do that for my children and theirs out of love and respect for them and their need for an understanding of where they came from and who they are. I know it's a priceless gift because these things are priceless to me.
New saying:
Record the journey. . . the treasure of time.