Postcards and Passports

Over the weekend, we had General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This usually constitutes about ten hours of TV watching (or listening) in the span of two days. I like to accomplish something during that time. During April's Conference, I cleaned all the exterior windows of my house, and I felt like I'd conquered the world! Plus, I was literally on a ladder during the talk “Ladder of Faith,” and I looked around my street going, “Is anyone seeing this?” (No one was seeing it. So disappointing). This time, I didn't have a game plan, but I ended up working on a task I'd been procrastinating for way too long. 

Many years ago, I saw an idea in a magazine for documenting family trips. The article suggested buying post cards and writing memories on the backs of them. I thought this sounded like a fun tradition for my kids, so over the years, as we've gone on vacations and trips, we've let them choose a post card, and then we write memories on the back and keep them in a box. The kids loving looking through their post cards. 

When we started this, I would hand write the post card for every kid with specific memories for each of them. Then, as the kids got older, and as I acquired more humans to document memories for, I started making them write the post cards themselves, and it was the equivalent of making them do homework. So now, to keep things easy, I just type up a blurb on the computer and print 4 copies and glue it to the back of the post cards.

The problem is, I got a bit behind. Over the last couple of years, our glove box in the van has filled up with empty post cards.

It's something I look at all the time and think, "I need to get those taken care of!" but it's really easy to procrastinate. This is where having a blog has been really helpful! I was able to go back to my blog posts for all of these trips and create a write-up for our post cards. With Daisy's help, we were able to complete about 40 post cards during General Conference on Saturday.

Another task we needed to catch up on was our National Parks Passports.  

During the more restricted parts of the COVID pandemic, some of the places we visited weren't letting people do the stamps in their passports. Instead, they had pre-stamped pieces of paper they would give us, so I needed to put those in the kids' passports as well as some of their stickers.

 A word about the Passports To Your National Parks:

We bought these books when we went to Dinosaur National Monument a few years ago. As you visit National Parks, you can purchase a sticker (or stamp) to put in your book, and you can also stamp the date (known as a "cancellation") in your book. We thought the books would be fun for the kids, and they have been. 

BUT...

My complaint is that they are divided by region, and they only have five pages per region. So we have already filled all the pages for our region, and there are several pages in other regions that we will likely never visit. This bugs me. So now our kids are putting stamps on pages that supposed to be for a different region of the nation. It's just a bad design. 

If I could do it over, I would purchase some nice, spiral notebooks with white, unlined paper (perhaps a sketchbook), and make our own books. Then I would let my kids get the stickers from the places we visit, do their passport cancellations, and pick a postcard to put in the book. 

It feels good to be caught up, and now I'm ready to go on some more adventures! Since Zoe is in fourth grade this year, we're hoping to take advantage of the free National Parks pass again, but we don't have anything in the works just yet.