Vacation Journal

Are you looking ahead to your summer vacation? I am. My family spends a week at a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina with loads of friends. We all have small children who will play all day and there will be wading in waterfalls, hiking up steep trails and lots and lots of roasted marshmallows.

This year I am taking an idea that I got from the talented Lois and making a Vacation Journal for my family to fill in during our trip. I have prepared pages, one for each day we will be gone, and put in spaces for photos and places to write our favorite meal, our favorite thing about the cabin, the animals we saw and the names of the friends who joined us. We also make up a lot of songs and I have set aside a few pages for us to write those down, too. My daughter, Cleo, is 5 and loves to write so I have made large spaces for her to do much of the writing.

I used a 7Gypsies blank board book with rings to make this journal and covered the pages with some 7G papers using the Binder's Tape. I used a few of the Envelopments pocket folds to make nifty photo pockets. I will bring pre-cut squares of lined paper and blank paper and colored pencils for my little artists to add commentary to the journal and some pages taken from my Rhodia pad and an 'adult' pen for my hubby and I to add our words. We'll paste the written on papers in as we write them. I have clipped some tags on and will permanently grommet the tags in their final spots at the cabin. I may use the clips to attach sticks, leaves or other 'found objects' that my girls pick up as treasures.

Lois' original books were actual altered books that she customized for her daughter and sons as they took trips alone. Her children have done this so many times now that they think of it as a natural part of taking a trip; you go away and you work on your altered book every day. She made a page per day and asked her children questions throughout the book ('what did you forget?' 'where did you get lost?' etc.) I think that especially for some teens and adults having a prompt every now and then would be a good idea.

I got all the goodies for my book at Panopolie, of course.