Keeping a bird watching journal provides an enjoyable summer activity for youngsters and the adults.    Actually this can be a year round project, but since it’s mid-spring, let’s start yours now.

There are various ways you can do this:

• Simply keep a list of the birds you see.
• List the birds and write something about them.
• Add a sketch to the list and description.
• Write a story or poem about the birds you see.
• Make a papier mache model of a bird…or use other materials for a bird sculpture.
• Make a painting of some of these birds you see and list.

In my anthology, Tales of Adventure and Discovery, you’ll find two poems, The Red-Winged Blackbird and Lord Baltimore Oriole.   I’ve written stories published in magazines about birds.  Some were nature stories and others were fiction.

I became intrigued with sketching birds after seeing a watercolor painting my mom did when she was attending teacher training class.  (I still have this painting she did 80 years ago.  ) So I went on to sketch and paint birds, even doing paintings on commission for customers.

Do you and your children like to keep track of the birds around you?

Writing makes the heart grow fonder.

That’s the conclusion of new University of Texas research on what happened when at least one partner in a couple wrote intensively about his or her deepest feelings about the relationship. Three months later, 77 percent of those couples were still together, compared with 52 percent of couples who wrote about everyday activities.  Full article at The Statesman

I personally find this study rather interesting since it’s always been my habit to journal each and every day.  I can go back to this same day, 20 years ago and tell you just what I was doing.  Over the course of time, I would of course, journal about my various relationships.  The only thing I gathered from those writings were all the reasons why the relationship was not right for me or a reflection of why the guy broke up with me and try to correct those faults in myself, IF the fault was mine to correct.

Do you journal your own relationships?  How do you think it’s helped or could help you?