Back to blogging

Oh dear, I've not been keeping up with my blogging as I'd wanted to. If I'm really honest with myself, it all went wrong last summer and I'm now regretting not keeping up to date, because my family and I really did have a brilliant summer. Oh well, you know the saying if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
There are things I have been doing though. I have been keeping a memory box and a memory book. Let me explain. The memory box is just an old shoebox which I get the children to decorate with stickers all over. It gets filled throughout the year with items that remind us of something we have done or somewhere we have been, like theatre tickets, seashells, paper place mats from a restaurant, postcard souvenirs, brochure or leaflet of a place we have visited and so on. The idea is that in years to come, we will look back at the contents of the box and enjoy talking about the memories.
It is a similar idea with the memory book. When I hear something funny, clever or just too cute, I write down the phrase or sentence in the book and the context of the conversation so that I never forget it. I also record their age at the time.  When the children are older, they will read it and laugh at themselves.
And of course, there is the obvious camera photos and camcorder but photos don't capture sound, conversation ,what was said etc. With the camcorder, it only captures what was happening at the time of recording but that might be something uneventful or mundane and often the best moments occur when the camera is off.
The camera has become something of a frenemy though. It's a friend because I always have it to hand, thanks to my iPhone, but an enemy because I never develop them! While I do regular back ups, I haven't been good at selecting which to keep and which to delete because I tend to take dozens of shots in order to get one good one.
Hence I am back to blogging. It is already half way through February in 2013 so I am already far behind but I hope to stay this time!