I think we all know how important journaling is, even if we never actually sit down to document the things going on in our lives! When I was growing up, my parents would make me and my four younger brothers do 30 minutes of piano practice, reading, and journaling before we could go outside and play. Journaling was probably my least favorite of the three! I hated how long it took to write things down and GUESS WHAT…I still hate manually journaling!
I know the value of it, and I want to remember every thing about this stage of life that I’m in. I wish I remembered more from my childhood and first pregnancy specifically, and I know that if I had journaled I would have those memories! But instead of wallowing in the loss of those years, I started digital journaling, aka, my blog.
I started this blog when Reagan was 1 and I wasn’t pregnant with Elliott yet, so I have all of my second pregnancy documented withe excessive amounts of pictures and blog posts and I LOVE it! I also have pretty much every daily struggle and success from the past three years documented in Instagram captions, and I’m so grateful to be able to look back and appreciate the stages of motherhood I was in.
For those of you wanting to journal more but who also hate the process of journaling, I am sharing the 3 Easiest Ways to Digitally Journal! And for those of you who enjoy writing things down, more power to you!
1.Start a blog – I already touched on this, but blogging has been a very easy and effective way for me to journal every step of the journey of our family! You don’t have to advertise your blog or even pay for a domain, if you want it for personal use only you can start blogging for free from sites like Blogspot and WordPress.com! It is so fun to look at some of my first posts and see how little Reagan was and read about all the things I was enjoying or struggling with at the time, and I’m so glad I have those written down!
2. Create Photo Books – I love apps like Chatbooks that will take photos AND captions from your social media pages and directly import them into a photo book. It takes all the work away from me and includes captions and dates so I get descriptions along with photos! Google photos also makes really great photo books, and it’s very easy to import the photos you want directly from your phone.
3. Make Home Videos – I can’t be the only one with hundreds thousands of video clips that I take of my kids everyday right? A couple years ago I started editing those clips down and putting them all together in annual videos on iMovie. It’s very simple to do, but takes a LOT of time. If you want cute videos but don’t have the time to put into them, there are companies who will do it all for you! These video are so sweet for me to watch and I wish (again) that I had started doing them earlier!