Baby Journals

One of the gifts that Andy & Rhoda sent for the babies was a set of two Quo Vadis journals in a zippered Maxpedition folio complete with retractable Pilot precise pens (he sent 4 pens in blue & black, both .5mm and .7mm points.  These pens are airplane safe by the way!) a metal ruler and Staedtler textsurfer highlighters.  He sent a hot pink journal for little girl and a black one for little boy.  These Quo Vadis journals are excellent for writing!  The pages are made with clairfontaine paper that doesn't bleed through to the back side and has a very smooth surface for writing.  The journals are excellent, with stitched binding that lays flat so that I can write from edge to edge on each page without having to waste space near the center binding or awkwardly try to squeeze my pen down into a ditch in the middle.  This journal is well known among fountain pen users, like Andy, as having a smooth, absorbent page which perfect for writing.  I don't use a fountain pen, but I still give it two thumbs up!

Its been fun to use the journals!  We added the babies' footprints to the inside covers and i recently added some colored pencils to the mix as well.  I have enjoyed writing about the family and sharing videos and photographs on the blog but this hard copy journal is something different, more lasting.  more intimate.  We write the kids letters in their journals.  We speak directly to them and it feels nice.  Cliff and I write in the journals and we hope that when family or friends come to visit, they will also write in the journals.  We don't do it everyday and I don't feel obligated to write in them at all.  (I operate under freedom much better than I do under guilt!)  I just keep them nearby and when I have something to say, I grab the journal and jot it down.  Some entries are short, some are a little longer, none of them have been more than 2 pages.  Sometimes I share a scripture with the babies, sometimes I just tell them what they did that day.  Its nice.  I doubt I will fill the journals very quickly.  Andy is an avid journaler, filling several a year, but I've never been very faithful with journaling.  I have a journal I really like that I have slowly been filling for the past decade or so.  That's more my style.  I go in fits and starts, but I keep going.  We'll see how these journals fare for the kids.  Andy has encouraged me to also include little pictures in the journals, have them postmarked at post offices and national parks when we travel and to also draw in them in order to mix things up and keep it fun.  he knows that I like photos and scrapbooking (at least theoretically) so those were all great suggestions for me.  Rubber cement is apparently the adhesive of choice among journalers, so I still need to pick some of that up.

Andy has done a good job having family members write in his kids' journals when they come to visit.  I always enjoy writing a note to his kids in their journals and I hope to do that with our kids' journals as well.  Aunt Holly wrote in their journals when she and cousin Meg came to visit in April.

I've seen some links online of journaling enthusiasts describing their journals and i saw one guy that decorates the covers of his journals with stickers and another who used paint pens to write on the binding to describe the time period the journal covered as well as the content.  I liked both of those ideas.  We'll see how I end up using mine.  The covers may not end up needing to be distinguished from a row of other journals if the potential title for the book would be "2012-2030!"