Children’s memory journals- how I keep journals for my kids

Until recently, I had memory projects for the kids all over the place; in word documents on the computer, in photo albums, in written journals, in folders, posts on the blog, and so on. It was confusing. I kind of knew were everything was, but it was a pain to look things up, and even harder to get the bigger picture. So last winter I decided to combine most of their memories in one place. You know how much I love journals, so naturally, the most obvious choice for me was handwritten journals. That’s how the kids’ memory journals came about. I’m so glad I did. I love them!

Why handwritten journals:

One of the most important things for me when I decided how to make them was that they were written by hand. Why? Two reasons:

• They’re more personal.
• Technology ages too quickly.

Personal: I toyed with the idea of making printed books, but handwritten ones are so much more personal. Somebody who loves them has taken the time to write down all the wonderful details of their lives, glue in photos and mementos, and really seen them for who they are. They’re tactile.

Technology ages quickly: When I was pregnant with Aoife I decided to write my pregnancy journal on the computer so that I could embed photos in the document, use fancy fonts and the like. It seemed the right way to go at the time. But 13 years on and a few computers later, those files are pretty much unreadable. It took a lot of time and effort to try to fix those broken documents. Some I wasn’t able to fix at all. 

What to put into children’s memory journals:

Spend some time early on deciding what you want to keep in the journals. The beauty of writing your own memory journals for the kids is that you’re not bound to cutesy themes and set memories like you are when you get printed ones. You choose what’s  important to you. If you don’t like the cutesy stuff, skip it. If it’s not important for you to remember when your child reached their arms up to you, don’t add it. You make it yours. 

This is what I keep in mine:

• Pregnancy journal
• Baby journal
• The funny things they say and do
• Observations
• Birthday interviews
• Letters to the children
• Favourite photos
• School life

Pregnancy journal: You can write about special doctor’s appointments, scans, parentcraft classes, as well as how you feel throughout the pregnancy, your cravings and odd behaviours, what you’re buying for the new baby and things like that. I also wrote letters to my unborn baby.

Baby journal: The baby is here! Wonderful! This is a great place to write down the birth story, milestones, special occasions and the like. 

The funny things they say and do: Before you know it, they’re toddling around and doing and saying the funniest things. They invent their own language as they try, and fail, to say things properly. You think you’ll remember their funny little words and phrases forever because they become part of your everyday vocabulary for a while, but you don’t. These words and stories make me laugh so hard every time I read them.

Birthday interviews: Come up with a set of 10-20 questions that you can ask them every year. You can ask them things like who their favourite friends are, what their favourite colour is (it’s amazing how often that one changes!), what their favourite book is. You may have some basic questions that you ask every year and some that you add as they get older. If your kids are really young, you may want to write a description of them at that age instead.

I absolutely love these and the kids do too. About a month before their birthdays, they come and ask me if it’s time to do them yet. They love answering the questions and they love looking back on previous ones, laughing and cringing at some of their old answers. 

Letters to the children: Pour your heart out. What do you want to say to them right now?

Favourite photos: Rather than making them photo albums or photo books, you can stick photos straight into their journals, so they become a natural part of their stories. 

If you journal a lot, you may want to invest in a photo printer of some kind since it is the quickest and smoothest way to get photos for your journals, but please don’t let not having one stop you from adding photos to your journal. There are ways around it, like using a good collage app that lets you edit photos and remove or personalise text, then uploading the collages to a free photo printing service.

School life: You may not be quite there yet, but when your kids start nursery and school, this is a lovely addition to their memory journal. At the start of a new school year, I open up a new spread in the journal, add their first day of school picture and some details about their new class (name of the class, who their teacher is), then leave the rest of the spread empty so I can fill in more details later. When I go back to it, I write about who their best friends were that year, what trips they did, what achievements they made, things that made me proud. I also try to get them to write their signature on the page.

While you can do all these things separately, I’d like to encourage you to mix them up and do them somewhat chronologically. It tells the story of their lives better and give both them and you a better overview of how things happened.

What type of journal to use:

This is totally up to you. Spend some time thinking over your likes and dislikes, your needs, and your hope for the journals. Do you need some structure and for all the journals to look kind of uniform on your shelf? Or do you get bored with the same look quickly and need to swap size, look and feel quite often? What kind of pen do you want to use?

I like mine quite structured, but simple, of a similar size and colour. I don’t use fountain pens, but I do sometimes sketch in my journal. I add photos, ticket stubs and things like that quite often. I do try other notebooks from time to time, but always return to Moleskines. They have plenty of pages (especially the new expanded versions), they lie flat (which is really important to me), and they write quite smoothly, yet I don’t feel precious about them.

No two memory journals will look the same and that’s great. Each journal should work for the person writing it. Run with it, have fun and make it your own. What do you want to put in yours?