Have you ever heard someone say, “Wow, I can’t believe how fast this year has gone by?” Like clockwork, every year? I knew I was going to need a journal, but not just any journaling journal—a bullet journal, as a way to keep track of our busy year. Once you have a kid, or many of them, time definitely has a different way of measuring up.
Now the timeline is more like a three-stage measurement: before kids, childhood, and the shiny kid-free retirement. We, my husband and I, are currently in the childhood phase. We measure our time-tracking and event-recalling based on our daughter’s age when these events occurred. For me, that makes time seem to be whizzing by quicker than I could have imagined.
So, here goes my turn with the phrase—I really can’t believe how fast our first year in San Diego has gone by. I’m so glad I chose journaling as my form of documenting, and for the most part, the creative in me stuck with it. This is my experience with Bullet Journaling.
If you haven’t heard of bullet journaling, or dot journaling, you’re not alone. It’s quickly becoming this trendy, creative way of managing your schedule and goal setting on the heels of the decorative planner fad. Much like decking out your planners with page inserts and stickers and whatnot, there are similar kits available geared toward your blank-canvas journal.
Its pages are dotted in a grid, ready for drawing in and measuring out the perfect charts, graphs, calendar memos, free-flowing art, etc. Whatever you can put on a blank page, you can put in your bullet journal. I just wandered into a bookstore and found one with a cover that caught my eye and went from there. I did some inspiration research on social media- mostly on Instagram, with hashtags (#bulletjournal, #dotjournal, #bulletjournaling, #bulletjournalinspiration, #bujo, #bujoinspo, #bujospreads) to see what everyone else was doing, and then I was ready to document.
My amazing husband is the reason we are now in the San Diego area. He accepted a job offer, so we packed up our little house, hit the road, and haven’t looked back since. We moved almost 500 miles from Northern California in the beginning of 2018. I didn’t want to miss out on capturing the memories of any of our new adventures, so I snapped photos like crazy, wrote journal entries rehashing the new places we ate, shopped, beached, and with whom we shared these new memories.
I can’t tell you the number of colored ink cartridges I’ve gone through or the number of metallic sharpies that drew their last lines or how many packs of photo paper I’ve Amazon’d. But there were many. And I’ve made it all the way to the December entries. That whole month still lacks the photo printouts, but it’s on my to-do list to finish it completely by the end of the month. Hold me accountable, people! I even braved sharing a few of my monthly title pages on my Instagram account and was surprised to see I’m not the only one out of my followers to venture down this journaling path.
During this project, finding the spare time to decorate the pages, or come up with the theme for the month, or sit down to physically write down all the details right after they happened, was a bit of a speed bump. In the beginning of the year, it was much easier to get pages done when I had more free time.
My daughter was at school all day. Journaling gave me a reason to avoid the piling laundry for a little longer. By mid-year I accepted a part-time position in an office that requires the exact amount of time I have available during the school day. SO… that left me with the end of the day- when I’m already drained, as lots of you mamas out there very well may be-to sit down in the glow of the desk lamp, after the kiddo was in bed, before we got tucked in ourselves. Needless to say, very little writing happened before bed. Then my entries were more sporadic, turning into week or weekend recaps. Not only that, but who wants to hear my ancient printer lasering away at photos after 9pm? *Cue crickets*
However, a really, very, big positive point—I have a whole first year to look back on. A year when my daughter was six, with a newfound love for the beach and sand castle building and seashell collecting. A whole year peppered with out-of-town visitors and the places we introduced them to, and the places we all discovered together.
My journal pages are full of silly selfies, and ticket stubs, and cool beer coasters, and stickers from school field trips, and craft store washi tape. I have a whole year in a new city, hundreds of miles away from the comforts of what we called home all our lives. My little family of three. Just us, exploring this new place together and finding that we enjoy the change. Seeing the progress of a big move on pages full of smiles and cool places just reassures the nurturer in me that we are doing OK. A whole year on paper, in photos, with new people, new jobs, a new school. We never planned for an opportunity like this one. But how lucky for us that we’ve made San Diego part of our future.
When all is printed, said, and done, I’ll be gluing the ends of the two journals together to make one bigger book. I’m proud to say we’ll get to look back at our first year someday, together.
Bullet journaling has reawakened my artistic side. It has allowed me to be a bit of a documenter and mom-tographer with my journal entries. A definite win for my artsy side: no boundaries or rules on how to use these dotted pages! Ruler, washi tape, sharpies, double-sided tape, and a good pair of scissors. A documenting crafter’s starter kit.
If you want to try your crafty hand at it, I fully support it! Go bullet journal-wild, Mama!
