Enjoying the Small Things

Enjoying the Small Things

Everything You Need to Start a Travel Journal

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As we are gearing up for summer and planning our travels, one of the first things I anticipate and excitedly plan for is my summer travel journal. I started keeping one a few years ago on our annual road trip to Michigan, and now it’s one of my favorite activities of the summer. Not only does the completed journal become a keepsake (my kids love looking at my old Michigan journals with me)–documenting so many things on our trip I would otherwise completely forget–but the activity creates a space for gratitude and helps me slow down during exciting adventures and really think about all the things I’m discovering and enjoying and my favorite moments on the trip.

It’s also a great activity for kids during travel. Lainey and I often side-by-side journal, a great creative bonding activity for us. And before big trips, I love getting her all set up with a little package of supplies that will make journaling fun–stickers and washi tape, colored pencils, a few good pens, and a little bag to keep it all in.

I change up how I journal every year, but last year was my favorite travel journaling experience. I had the sweetest blank book journal, handmade by my friend, and I wrote in it every single day, drawing pictures and writing down all the things that were making me happy on our trip. Every morning, I poured my coffee, lit a candle and sat down to color and write whatever I could think of that was memorable the day before–something I wore that made me happy, something funny Dash said, a dinner we enjoyed together on my dad’s back deck, my favorite scenes from a town we visited. And then my kids got all into it, wanting to see the new journal pages every day.

Want to keep a travel journal this year? Do it! Even if you’re not taking any trips, journaling through summer can help create a tourist perspective and help you reflect on things you love, making even the places you experience every day seem suddenly more special. Before you get started, here are a few things that have helped make our journaling experience more meaningful and fun:

Favorite Journals

Dig & Co. Adventure Journal & Travel Case
I used this journal last year, and I loved it. The size is perfect, the pages are all blank so you can completely freestyle your entries, it’s handmade and personalized with whatever you want on the front, and it comes in the sweetest wool case. I have looked back through this journal several times this year after we returned, and it never fails to make me happy.

I Was Here: A Travel Journal for the Curious Minded (Chronicle)
This year, I’m keeping just a small 5/5 watercolor sketch journal to paint favorite things on my trip, so I’m using this journal with it to document other adventures. It’s full of the most fun, creative prompts (I have a feeling Lainey will love it too) like writing down snippets of conversations you hear from people talking on their phone and writing down what you imagine the person on the other line is saying, asking people you meet for recipes, recording colors you see, making press releases for your daily adventures. I’m so excited to fill it this summer.

Square Watercolor Journal (5×5)
I bought one of these for me and one for Lainey for this summer. The goal is to illustrate one spread a day with a scene we remembered from the day. I love how little and simple it is (perfect to keep in my purse).

Kids Travel Journal (Mudpuppy)
This is a great beginner travel journal for kids. It includes some great prompts as well as lots of free space for their own writing.

What to Journal
So now you have a journal for your travels–what do you put in it? The sky is the limit! Sure, you can simply record what you did and saw every day, but travel journaling gets really fun when you color outside the lines and include all sorts of other details from the trip.

Tape pictures and ticket stubs in it, draw, doodle, color. Here’s a list of fun things to include while you’re journaling:

– Places you visit
– Great meals you ate
– Things you fell in love with
– Fun souvenirs you bought
– Funny things that happened on trip
– Favorite moments
– Quotes from people on the trip
– Things you wore
– Tape or tuck in pockets: pictures, postcards, bumper stickers, ferry tickets, plane tickets, event tickets, brochures, receipts to a great meal
– Write down all the songs from your road trip playlist and rate them 1-10
– Make a list of the favorite things you packed in your suitcase for the trip (your kids will love reading this someday)
– Keep a list of your favorite smells from the trip
– Write down detailed steps for the perfect s’more you made at the first summer campfire
– Describe in detail your favorite breakfast from your travels
– Document a new recipe discovered on your trip (your sister’s dill dressing, your Bed & Breakfast owner’s pineapple smoothie)
– Write down all the songs you chose on the jukebox at the mountain lodge you stayed at
– Document all the things you bought thrifting
– Take pictures of your family members standing in front of something that’s the same color as their outfit and tape them in journal.
– Take pictures of a family member doing handstands in funny places on trip and tape them in journal.
– Do daily challenges like “5 Things that are Yellow that I Saw Today” or “5 Things that Remind me of Love I Noticed Today”

Pictures
One of our favorite things for trips is our Polaroid ZIP Printer.

It’s this itty bitty printer that fits in my purse, and it requires no ink–the magic is in the paper. It connects to my phone, and I can print any pictures I take in a matter of a few seconds. The back paper on the photo can be peeled off to turn the photo into a sticker, so you can add photos to your travel journal in a snap.

I’ve had a couple different portable printers like this as well as Instax cameras, and this, by far, prints the best photos. I have a photo printed from this printer on my refrigerator, and it’s been there three years and hasn’t faded.

Art Supplies

Not everyone likes to get arty in their journals, but I love drawing and coloring in mine. Art supplies we keep in our journal bag:

Watercolor Pocket Paint Set
Sakura Micron Pens (won’t bleed with the watercolor paints)
Prismacolor Pencils (we also use Crayola)
Draw 500 Nature Things The best little drawing book
20 Ways to Draw a Dress
Stickers: Michael’s and Joann’s both have a great selection of travel stickers including specific destinations. I’m not as “scrapbooky” as I used to be, but Lainey loves adding these to her journals.

Travel Journal “Pen Pals”

One other way to make travel journaling extra fun, especially for kids, is to find journal partners. This year, we’re pairing up with our Nashville friends who are also traveling this summer. We bought the same journals, and at least once a week, we’ll take photos of our journal pages and the things we’ve recorded and text them to our journal friends and vice versa. Kind of like pen pals. :o) It’s a great way to share adventures, and a fun challenge to keep us creative and committed to our trip documentation.

 

Round Rattan Bag 4 Ways

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I’ve determined the It Bag of the summer is a chic round rattan bag, popping up on sites and in stores everywhere and fitting in nicely with my summer dreams of picnicking, strolling beach docks and looking chicer than I ever will in real life. I mean, the jig is up–I’m the girl who drags toilet paper from her shoe. A girl can dream though, and dreams for this chic rattan bag come in so many flavors because this bag is a blank canvas begging to be jazzed up with accessories and colors. As for the bag itself, I fell in love with this one and this one but didn’t want to pay that much, so I found this one for $30, and it’s perfect.

Now comes the fun part–accessorizing. Four easy ways to transform your bag:

So quick and easy to switch out and depending what scarf you choose, you can make the bag take an elegant vibe or make it summery and fun (like this kid version with multiple gingham scarves).

This was really just a way to slip in my Shrinky Dink obsession, but still–I love it! Inspired by this project we did last year, we made three fruit tags and tied them on with a little string.

Want to step it up a notch?

Looks like a totally new bag. We dug through our craft bins to find some pom-poms and stitched them on with a needle and some embroidery floss. The basket weave of the rattan makes it easy to slip needles in and out, and just a few stitches held our pom-poms in place. If you want to change it up again, you can clip the stitches out and start from scratch–which you’ll totally want to do because there’s one more transformation…a full rainbow.

This one is, of course, my favorite and surprisingly didn’t take long at all. I used a thicker needle with a bigger eye so I could thread chunky rainbow yarn through. The needle is a little more blunt but still poked through the inside lining of the bag without a problem. I started each color arc securing a knot on the inside of the bag and threading the needle in and out of the bag 4-5 times to hold the shape of the rainbow arc and securing another knot on the inside. Repeat with each color.

Only one thing left to do–fill the bag with used wadded Kleenex, capless lip balms, snack crumbs, loose dimes, Band-Aids that fell out of their wrappers and a pen with no ink to make it mom ready. Let’s go.

Breakfast for Dinner: The Best Buttermilk Pancakes Ever

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When I was in college, I lived with my grandparents–in a light blue house on Dorothy Lane where at the same time every morning, breakfast was served on the same lap trays in the same chairs while we watched the same news programs in the living room. When we finished our breakfast, the dishes were washed while my grandma hummed the same tunes, the dog was taken out to the same patch of grass, my grandpa retreated to his office where he’d begin his ham radio routine at the same time every morning, and my grandma would start a load of wash–often with just a few dish towels and whatever she could convince me to add to it–simply to continue the pattern of sameness. While their younger years delivered thrilling adventures–living abroad, mission trips to far off lands, writing and speaking and entertaining–in the last chapters of their life, they clung to the comfort of daily routines in a small country town where “going out” meant one of three things–Hutch’s Grocery Store, Weatherwax Drugs or Streeters Hardware. Instead of a downtown, the hub of Spring Arbor, Michigan was (and still is) its college campus and the Free Methodist Church in which its founding principles were rooted.

For three years, the steady rhythm of that small time life and the dependable routines of my grandparents’ home grounded my lost yet searching heart, although at the time I complained about the boredom and joked that the only excitement that town offered was when someone hit a deer on M-60. By that standard, Spring Arbor was practically Burning Man. What I realize now and wish I could have appreciated then though, is that my grandparents’ seemingly small town predictable life was anything but monotonous. In fact, it was magic, laden with intentional rituals that put jeweled crowns on otherwise ordinary events–the way my grandma used the good dishes every day and served ketchup in tiny bowls with miniature spoons, the way they huddled together before the sun rose to read scriptures and pray for their grandchildren–out loud, by name, the way they planned an afternoon drive to the orchard to pick up September apples as if it was a much anticipated annual road trip (it was), the way my grandma ironed her slacks and wore leather pumps to head to a coney island dinner at the A & W. They took their little ordinary life in a small house in a small town, and they made it grand by playing the hand they had been dealt with such creative thought and intentions of meaningful connection. The moral of the story: They won the game.

I could write pages of the cherished rituals they passed down to me, but today I write one because I pulled it out of my memory box this week and made it a part of our own home–my great  grandpa’s buttermilk pancakes for dinner. We had them once a week for dinner when I lived with my grandparents, and even though I couldn’t grasp then the meaning of all their rituals, when I came home from classes and saw a buttermilk carton and electric frying pan on the counter, I knew what was coming was special. And while there’s so much I’ve sadly forgotten about the three years I lived with my beloved grandparents, I remember everything about buttermilk pancake nights because they were different from the rest–they were special.

Because my grandma wanted us to eat them hot and so she could be with us while we ate, she poured the pancakes right at the table, setting up her electric frying pan at one end so could she could cook and eat and talk and serve us without leaving the table to flip a pancake or pour another on the griddle. Moms spend their whole lives trying to figure out how they can do three tasks at once. I guess you finally figure it out when you become a grandma.

I brought the griddle to the table this week, telling my kids that my grandma did the same. I knew just how the batter should be bubbling before I flipped a pancake because my grandma showed me how. I threw out the first pancake even though it looked perfectly fine because my grandma always threw hers out, claiming the first ones are “horrid.” And, just like my grandma did, I ate my first pancakes with butter and syrup but saved the best one for last–a spoonful of brown sugar piled on top, hollowed out to make room for a puddle of cream. “Luscious,” she called that last one.

It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten breakfast for dinner, but as I told my family the story of how I used to do it every week with my grandparents, I remembered perhaps the greatest power of all in ritual…the ability to bring to life what you miss–even just for a moment–and the connection to something bigger.

With no further ado, buttermilk pancakes from the recipe of L.D. Gates from Mesick, Michigan. He made them in a cast iron pan on an old wood burning kitchen stove. Mine will never taste as good.

I like to keep the batter more buttermilky than flourish (two adjectives I just made up, thank you) because I like thinner pancakes, but have at it with making them just how you like. You can, of course, serve them for breakfast which is what my dad does on the back deck of his cabin in Northern Michigan (all hail to the ritual gods!).

These measurements are in mL because the family recipe we all share now comes from a handout my uncle made for his chemistry students, using buttermilk pancakes to teach a lesson about the chemical reaction that happens with the baking soda. It’s four simple ingredients

Baking Soda
Water
Flour
Buttermilk

Heat griddle to 350-400°. Put 1.5 rounded tsp of baking soda in a large mixing bowl. Add 100 mL water and stir.

Measure 500 mL buttermilk and pour into the baking soda mixture while stirring gently. At this point, my uncle would have you write what reaction is evident, but you can skip that part. Add flour slowly, with gentle mixing, until the consistency is to your liking (thick enough to hold shape on the frying pan). Don’t worry if there are lumps–just make sure the flour is all moistened.

Spoon/pour the mixture onto hot griddle to form your pancakes. Peek underneath and flip once they are golden brown (batter should be nice and bubbled on top). Remove when second side is nicely browned. Eat immediately with butter and maple syrup. Spin your own ritual.

More on ritual (and a fun full moon rituals printable for this weekend!) in this week’s newsletter. You can sign up here.