A Love Letter to My Children

It's Valentine's Day! Flowers, jewelry, chocolate and love letters! So many choices to show those you love how you feel. When my girls were young and I made them lunch I would cut their sandwich into a heart shape and stick an 'I love you' note in the lunch box. Now that they are away at school I can't do that, but I am in the process of writing a long, detailed love letter to my children.

My valentines

I Love You When...

I am making time this year to organize my photos in my FOREVER account. In each photo I can see another reason I love them, another memory I don't want to forget and I don't want them to forget. So as I organize, I am making sure people are identified in the photo. So they know who else was part of their life. What good is a photo if you don't know who is in it?

I make sure the stories are there. Some photos can tell a story, some need a little help.

I am getting to the age where I reminisce more. I ask them if they remember events and they say 'I don't know if I remember event or just reading about it with the pictures'. Either way they remember they can tell their story.

My Story too

While my children were born in the age of digital cameras, I was not. I have had a number of photos from my childhood digitized by FOREVER Digitization. Photos of my first days of school, birthdays and holidays. Pictures that include my sisters, my mom, my childhood friends. What I love about FOREVER is that I can assign dates to these photos of when they were taken not just added.

I can tell the story as I remember it and identify the people in the story. It's a story they never lived, but they can know as well. They can see a time where we all less body fat and more hair. (it was the 80's everyone had more hair!) Maybe more importantly they can see the resemblances. It is much easier to explain why they remind me of their aunt when they can see the photos side by side. Between that and the photo recognition struggling to tell the difference between the two of them.

Their History

The photos aren't just of me but of my mother, and her mother and every photo I could find and have digitized of their great grandfathers, and great great grandmothers. I don't have as many stories to go with these photos. I wish I did! I have the names, estimated dates and information from genealogy research. I have included everything I can.

My great grandparents when they were courting

I wish I had my grandmother's thoughts on traveling from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to the then newly renamed Acadia Park in Bar Harbor, Maine. Or my Great Grandfather's thoughts of moving to the United States as a teenager. I am organizing them by family lines. I am running facial recognition on them. Recording all the connections. It is my love letter to tell children and future generations that this is where you came from. This is who we were. We are a part of you and we loved you before we knew you.

Happy Valentine's Day.

For the record - I like chocolate (any day of the year).