While trying to come up with prompts for this month’s blog posts, I was thinking it’d be a great time to give insight into who we are or how we are. After being a couple for over ten years, aside from adventures and memories, these are some of the things we’ve collected / are collecting:

1. National Park passport stamps and other swag.

Wherever we travel and whenever possible, we visit the national parks of the area. The national parks make collecting something from each national park easy with their Passport to the National Parks. Over the years, we’ve forgetten to bring the passport along every trip, so now we have a total of four passports we have started.

As for other national park swag we’ve collected, it’s ranged from ornaments to beer bottle openers to the elevation magnet.

2. Fish decor.

When we first started dating, Ryan had mentioned an interest in fishing, so I booked his first fishing trip. The rest is history, j/k. Since then, we’ve picked up random decor items that are fish-themed - a metal fish sign, a fish paperweight, some fish artwork, and a wooden fish plate. One of these days, I hope to gather more fish-themed items and put them together on one wall.

One of two pieces of fish artwork from our trip to Cuba

Wooden fish plate from my trip to Bali

3. Disney & other pins.

With our Disney annual pass this year, we have made many trips to Disneyland. Since there’s an unending supply of Disney merchandise that one can buy, we zeroed in on the whole pin and pin trading situation. At the beginning of the year, I made a bulk order of tradeable pins, and each trip to Disneyland, we have traded them for ones that we liked more. We also bought pins for the special occasions and holidays with our favorite pins being the ones that have a unique shape or a moveable component.

To keep them organized, we placed them onto a giant corkboard, and since there was extra space, we started adding other pins as well. The main requirement - they’re cute or hold some significance for either of us.

The Disney pins we’ve collected this year

4. Legos.

We went through a phase of buying and building Legos, mostly those in the Creator Expert line. There’s something very satisfying about sorting the pieces, following the instructions, building something and seeing it all come together.

5. Stickers.

While I don’t have any of the sticker books from my childhood, in recent years, my love for stickers has been reignited. While this is more of my thing, as a couple, we have a chest freezer downstairs which we have covered in stickers (mostly from breweries).

As for my own personal sticker collections, I have a binder of the super cute work mascot stickers that I’ve collected in the 2.5 years at my company, and as long as they’re printing out new ones, I’ll try my best to add to my collection. I also found out about and joined Mrs. Grossman’s Sticker Club, a monthly sticker shipment, so every month, I get a small sticker surprise.

Five seemed to be a good number to stop at, but there are plenty of other things we’ve collected over the years. Part of the fun is finding things that we both can agree on. But based on the above and viewing our home and everything in it, one might conclude that we’re essentially adult-aged children.

Is there anything you collect?