One highlight of my daughter’s sixth birthday is her new family dialogue journal. She picked out her composition notebook covered in rainbow hearts on Saturday morning’s shopping trip. I planned to wrap it, but she snuck it out of the bag and beat me to the first entry!
She knew the treasure she held in her hands as she has observed her older sister write letters back and forth to me for the past few years.
Family dialogue journals are amazing tools to write the gamut of emotions we feel. The family dialogue journals become not only communication tools but family keepsakes.
Making time to create such keepsakes is imperative. I bet you can relate to a busy lifestyle. These journals slow me down a bit. I love it when I find one of my girl’s journals on my nightstand where she has written an entry for me to read. I take a moment to read it, write back as soon as I can, and leave it on her pillow.
Sometimes, the journal must be handed to the person, as DeLainey did last June. The rainy day and a flooded basement at the rental house made Dad arrive home too late for all of us to go out to dinner for my birthday. I believe it was DeLainey’s first experience with an uncelebrated birthday. Our day was our typical routine, including bedtime. Breaking the rules, she came down the stairs, trying a stay-up-past-my-bedtime tactic, but she surprised us. She surprised me.
DeLainey handed me our dialogue journal. Tears rimmed her blue eyes as she hugged me without a word and raced back to bed. The letter, so personal, shared her sadness for me. I wrote back and she woke up the next morning to a handwritten note that shared how much I enjoyed my birthday because I spent the day with her and her siblings. She needed to know her letter was the best birthday gift I received.
The journals are a gift of words, emotions, memories, and truth. The girls decided they can write letters to one another in the journals and Dad can write, too. I know over the years, our family will fill the journals with love letters, tear-dried pages, and notes of frustration. Our journal entries allow us to share the power of words with one another and strengthen the heartstrings that tie together our family’s tapestry.