The 2014 Memory Jar

On New Years Eve, as we were tucking the girls in for bed, we told them it would be a whole different year when they woke up. The previous night, we had talked about why New Years Eve is a special day. "It's the last day of the year," I said, "and we like to take time to remember all of the things we did this year and look forward to what we will do next year."

365 days is a lot of time for six or four-year-old to try to reflect on. They do a fine job recapping the last chapter we read in Charlotte's Web, or remembering what their gymnastics coach taught them last week. But when I say, "one year ago, I had just come home from the hospital with your baby brother." they remember that it happened, but have no sense of when. They might remember the carnival in the mall parking lot if I described it to them, but I doubt they would remember their first experience piping frosting. Of course, I'm sure the twins remember things more clearly than M.

Somewhere amid the discussion, I heard one of the twins grumble, "A year is a really long time!" When you've only lived through six of them, the scale must be vastly different than after twenty-six. Besides, their world is so full of excitement and fun that I imagine it's hard to retrieve all of the little pieces by the end of the year. So, I resolved to make a memory jar this year. Using a clean spaghetti sauce jar (I saved a bunch of them a year or so ago) with a new label I made myself, I created a sort of time capsule we'll use all year. At the end of the year, we'll look at all of the pictures and notes in the jar and then close it and save it for the kids to look back on when they're older.

Our first memory went into the jar on the first day of the year. I took a picture of all of the kids with Papa's mom and step-dad (who visited for New Years), printed it, cut it out, and wrote the date and a one-line description on the back. I decided to fold it so the date showed and the picture was inside. Now, when we sort through the memories at the end of the year, we can set them out in order by date before reading and opening them. We can revisit the year as it happened.

I wish I had been doing this all along. Better late than never, I suppose.