Ice cream, check.
Sprinkles, check.
Bananas, check.
Candy toppings, check.
Today is the last day of school for my girls so we are celebrating! I borrowed this idea from my mom. Growing up, the last day of school for my siblings and I included the same celebration. Last-day-of-school build your own sundaes! Friends and neighbors invited too! This was one of those isolated events in my memory as a child being a very special time. We all have them. They are snapshots of singular experiences when we were young that stay with us through all of our years. Often these memories are only activated when we go through a similar experience with our own children.
Books in the home provide other powerful images that come to my mind. I discovered soon after having kids and reading to them that some books unleashed very familiar, yet distant memories. Some books I remember well, others I didn’t even recall until I opened a book up and the images and language all came back. Some of them are oldies but goodies like Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and some are unknown gems such as Clyde of Africa by Michael Mason.
These are experiences that had an imprint on us. As parents we all have the opportunity to create these imprints on our own children and that is a very cool thing to have. What imprints do you have from YOUR childhood and which ones do you want to create for your own children?
Having received and sent countless Be There Bedtime Stories, my children will have memories of reading experiences that I never had. I wonder which ones they have tucked away in the recesses of their minds that will come back to visit them again someday…