In certain ways I am a dinosaur.

Or I’m just kind of set in my ways.

Or I’m just set in my dinosaur ways.

Whatever.

I prefer a paper calendar over a digital calendar.

I also like having a calendar on the kitchen wall - it’s how I grew up, it’s what I’m used to, and it really helps keep me organized.

If there’s an appointment that needs to be made, I won’t do it without checking the kitchen calendar.

That’s the master list of obligations - everything that everyone in the family has scheduled goes on that calendar.

It’s what I check to see what’s happening in the upcoming week and it’s where I track the school calendar. (This is different from my planner that I told you about a couple of weeks ago which is just my work and personal obligations.)

And Kathy does a nice thing every year where she makes a calendar using family photos so that’s also something that makes me happy.

It arrived at the end of last week and I’ve spent the past few days inputting the 2026 information we have onto the new calendar - school dates, doctor’s appointments, and work obligations.

We have these calendars dating back to 2007 because that's when our oldest was born…and we have another tradition that I tried to stop last year because we have so many calendars - we take out the big stack of calendars and look at all the baby pictures from across the years.

I thought maybe we’d just go through, like, five of the calendars.

That was met with an uproar - everyone wanted all the calendars. (Which kind of makes me happy. I thought I was the only one who cared about stuff like that.)

So on New Year’s Day when we take the 2025 calendar off the wall we’ll go through 18 or so calendars month by month and look at the pictures (and see events and obligations from years past)…and then we’ll look at the pictures coming up in 2026.

And I’ll have one of my organizational tools on the wall for the new year.