Welcome to March! This is usually when the weather starts warming up and spring blooms appear. I’m so ready for warm sunshine and bright colors to come back.

But first, let’s wrap up February’s reading with my stats for the month. If you remember, the theme was Frozen, which fit the weather in parts of the world (but as it turns out, not in mine–but more about that later).

Was it a good reading month? Surprisingly, yes, although that might not be immediately obvious from these stats. I only finished reading 6 books for two reasons. First, I’ve started a bunch of books at once and just haven’t finished them (and I only count pages from completed books). If you follow my Goodreads, you know that I’m currently reading six different books! But second, as you can see from the lefthand page, I also read a ton of serial stories.

After thinking about how to include serial stories in my journal, I decided to list them separately from books. I read a lot, mostly sampling the first chapter or two of different stories to see if I liked them. But some I got hooked on and kept going. I had no idea how many I’d read until I wrote them all down and counted: sixty! I don’t know the page counts on any of these, but that’s gotta be at least a few books’ worth if they were combined.

Anyway, moving on to March’s theme. I’m repeating one from last year because I loved it so much: cherry blossoms! This time, just the flowers, not including Sakura the character. I have even more sakura washi and stickers than last year so I could go pretty crazy with this one.

The big quote and most of the stickers are from Sweet Kawaii Design, the thicker washi (and the pen) is from Simply Gilded, the thin washi is from Daiso, and the tiny frog stickers I’m using to track my reading are from Stickii Club. You can’t see it very well here, but the scarf that I’m using for the backdrop actually came from the National Cherry Blossom Festival in DC when I went in 2019. It’s full of happy memories from that wonderful trip.

I saved the cherry blossom stickers in my reading journal (and my planner) for March because that’s when I usually see cherry blossoms. But this year, we had an unexpected warm spell in the middle of February, and I actually got cherry blossoms for my birthday! But that means most of the cherry blossoms in my neighborhood are actually falling off the trees now. Whenever I go for a walk, I see the streets covered in petals. The leaves are coming in, taking over the branches from the final flowers. Oh well! I can still hold the memory of the blossoms.

Here is my cherry tree about the time it hit peak bloom, on February 21:

Whenever the cherry blossom season happens in your part of the world, I hope you get outside and enjoy them while they last!