31 Days of Family Fun: Share Your Past

Flickr, Ross Griff

I touched on this in my first post, but I want to go a bit more into some detail about the idea of sharing your past and who you are with your children.  Most of us sit down with the baby books and photo albums or scrapbooks and show them to our children.  We might tell stories to give the photos context and reminisce together.  But I’m talking about taking this a little bit further…making it more tangible.

Flickr, Shorts and Longs

I’ll never forget when I was about 12 years old and we were having a 50s themed dance at my school.  I came home to tell my mom all about it and ask for her help in figuring out what to wear.  Mom pulled out her old saddle shoes from the closet and made me a poodle skirt,  What’s more, she pushed the living room furniture out of the way, turned on the stereo, and taught me how to jive.  Mom was only around 40 at the time (of course at my age, she seemed OLD) but to see her pulling off what I viewed as the most amazing dance moves right there in front of me just had me in awe.

Flickr, Seattle Municipal Archives

We laughed and laughed as I tried to imitate her steps and when we were finally huffing and puffing from exhaustion, we sat down on the couch with a cold glass of iced tea and she pulled out her old high school yearbooks.  There were pictures of her from various school dances, photos of her receiving prizes in dance contests, and lots of autographs from her friends about how they wished they could dance as well as she could.  In her senior year, there was a page where the yearbook staff chose some quality from each graduate to “will” to the upcoming juniors.  They chose to leave my mom’s “fabulous legs and dancing shoes” to one of girls in the junior class.  It was such an eye opener!  Mom had never talked about how much she loved dancing or how good she was at it in the past – not even after the many dance classes I had taken.  And, I sure had never seen her actually dance before either!  It was one of those “hey my parents are human and they were young just like me once!” kind of moments.

My mom

So what special talents do you have?  It doesn’t have to be something big! Maybe you’ve always been really good at blowing giant bubbles with bubble gun.  What did you excel at as a kid?  Maybe you had the best fast ball out there.  What were your favourite hobbies?  Maybe you had a killer stamp collection and can show your kids a few of your favourites and tell them why you loved them so much.  Even if your kids don’t share  and want to pursue exactly the same interests, the insight they gain learning about yours can be an incredible bonding experience that they will remember and smile about for years to come.

This post is part of a month long series 31 Days of Family Fun.  Follow the link to the beginning of the series to get caught up:  http://cynchronicity.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/31-days-of-family-fun-the-basics/

Check out the hundreds of other 31 Days participants blogging on a wide variety of topics here:http://www.thenester.com/2011/09/31-days-participants.html/