Day 23: Keep a Record
For as long as I can remember my mom has kept a journal. When I was young I believe she kept more than one, capturing many of the crazy and funny things each of the kids did when we were little and still cute. I admit, I’ve been rather slackerly on the journal keeping lately, but for years I wrote faithfully in my journal, in some of them I wrote on one side the page and used the other side to tape pictures, play tickets, invitations to events, letters and anything else that I talked about that day. One of my journals is easily twice as wide at the open side as it should be, I had some many little bits and pieces of my life crammed into it.
There are lots of ways of writing our personal history. I guess one could argue blogging is, in a small way (very small for me) a way of journaling. My older writes a family letter that she emails out to all of the relatives, and often includes photos. Since she lives in Mexico and only gets back to the states once or twice a year it enables us all to keep up with her family and what’s going on next. A few years back she started keeping her family letters in a file, as a journal of her family’s activities. Someday her grandchildren will mention something about studying the Swine Flu, and she’ll be able to pull up her file and show them that their moms got to skip school for three weeks because of the F1N1 virus–even though there were no cases in her city. And the girls hated being home and missing school (I know! how many moms are lucky enough that their kids love school? Then again, how many of their kids only have 8 or 9 kids in their class?)
My youngest two sisters scrapbook a plenty, and the fourth sister melds the family letters with scrapbooking, and who knows what else (she’s amazing, if she’s not teaching one of her 19 piano students or taking care of her four kids, she’s probably decorating a birthday or wedding cake).
I guess keeping a record is something we all learned from Mom.