Gift for Your Adult Children

My friend Cay has taught "Writing Life Stories" for years and even volunteered to teach at a few Senior Centers. She has written 160 class handouts for her students, however, told me, "I was always writing the new class lessons and not writing my own stories." She decided to work on her own life stories for her grown children.

This is her story in her words.

"Back in 1993 I wrote the story of our family and photocopied about a trillion pages of snapshots, had some reprinted so each of our three children would have their own copy. The story was in 6 chapter....heritage, montage of each one, the Paris years, family holidays, family vacations, & life after high school.

I made 5 copies cuz by then Pierre & I had been divorced for almost 15 yrs, but we always had birthdays & holidays together. I put each page in those "page savers" that are archival safe & in the books which were loose leaf notebooks.

The kids absolutely loved it - and I've always said I'd made a big mistake cuz I had gift opening b4 dinner so when I'd ask 'can somebody set the table, please?' 'In a minute, Mom'...can someone cut the bread...ditto, & so it went. They were so excited that they could hardly talk cuz they were so enthralled.

Lincolnia - one of the assistants was working on a degree in gerontology & had to do a special project with seniors. Afterwards, one of the other people in the class asked if I would continue to teach the class as I was the only person from the class who'd done anything with it.

It was such fun for me to see my grown children's excitement when they opened the identical boxes...all of them spent the rest of the evening reading."

What a GREAT GIFT for your grown children. A gift that only a Mother could give.
June