How to Make Your Own Dog Journal

Keeping your dogs health records and other information organized is important. Here, pet expert Wendy Nan Rees explains how to make your own dog journal to keep all your dog's important records organized as well as creating a wonderful keepsake.

Have fun creating your dog journal.

This is a wonderful tip to start at any time in your dog’s life, and if by chance you are at the puppy stage then all the better. By no means is this tip just for the new puppy owners at all! If you don’t have the time now, then just enjoy the tip on how to make your dog’s own personal journal and know that at any age this is a wonderful tool to have for both you and your vet to look back on.

We should never depend on just our memories because not only can we forget the smallest of details, but the way our brains work sometimes, we don't remember certain aspects of life. This is usually when something is unpleasant or hurts us and our subconscious will put things in a place in our brain we do not want to access.

By having a personal journal for each dog family member, you have not only a photo album, but an entire history of your dog’s life, from vaccinations to holidays to birthdays to vacations to possible breeding or surgery. You will have an entire history of your dog’s life.

If at any time you need anything, you can go to this journal, look up the date and read what you have written for that week, say in 2004. I still have my journal for my Black Lab, Governor, who passed away in 2005, which I keep because I personally am not ready to part with it yet. I do know this journal has helped me many times in the last twenty-something years of owning dogs and the past thirty-something years of owning horses.

Here is what you will need.

I like to use a faux leather-bound notebook that has an open front window so that I can put my own picture or cover art in the front of the notebook, but I very much like to have the ring binder on the large side for these types of projects. I also like the one that has large, inside pockets on each side of the book. Then I buy very large page dividers that will sometimes have pockets of all different sizes and many different styles and I mix them up to blend into my books.

If you are making your first book and this is something you feel you may make as a gift, then you know you’re going to spread out the cost of the dividers between a few books. If you are only going to make one book and this is not cost effective for you then find a good sized, larger notebook with sturdy dividers in it that you can add more regular pages and photo pages to. Now you are ready to personalize it to your heart’s content. Either way you decide to go, your book is going to work wonderfully and there are never any mistakes. How can there be, as it is art and “beauty is in the eye of the beholder!”

I have a label maker and I love it, so I use it to label the spine of all my journals. This helps to keep a uniform look to them. I also like to use one color as I again like to keep this uniform look. As for my style, I have maroon faux leather for Senny, Leopard faux for Little Man, and Cappy has faux leather--rich dark brown, of course. As for the front of each book, I have the window box which is just a clear plastic box, but I created a color picture of each dog and made a nice label of their name with a cute bit of my art and that is it. Call it a day. I am done with my journal and it is ready to go.

I hope this will inspire you to start your own weekly or monthly doggie wellness journal. I know it has offered me great help over the years and it has also offered me great pictures when I have needed something from the past in a hurry.

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