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Dear Older Me: A Time Capsule Gift and Other Birthday Tradition



Dear Older Me – A Time Capsule Present for all ages

Birthdays are special days to celebrate life. It’s the day you’re showered with best wishes, love and presents. You quietly make a wish as you blow out the candles.

One tradition we recently started is the “Dear Older Me Time Capsule”.




Earlier this week, my husband was having a conversation with my youngest son.

     Dad: “14 – That’s the wonder years – a perfect age to set your goals.”

     Son: “What things did you do when you were 14?”

     Dad: “I knew I wanted to build my bed and cabinet. So I learned carpentry. I think you should write down what you want accomplished and when you’re 25, you’ll look back at what you’ve actually done. It’s like a time capsule of predictions and goals for when you’re older.”



  

Every year we go through various changes - physical, mental, social and emotional. 

Young teenagers want to be independent. They want to make their own choices about school, activities, and relationships. They develop their own interests and personalities. They sometimes think they don’t need guidance from their parents, but like any stage in one’s life, parents play a vital role in a teenager’s life.

A teenager’s brain is still in construction. However, the capacity to learn will never be greater than during adolescence.  So this is the stage where we try to encourage our children to read more, learn aggressively and create new things.


So for my son’s 14th birthday, we encouraged him to write what he wanted to have accomplished by the time he’s 25. Goals he wants to do, fun and safe things he wants to experience, new things he wants to  learn, and list the things that make him happy.


Aside from creating a journal, you can also record a video of your child enumerating the things he believes he would have accomplished by time he’s 25. Back-up that file or copy that file into a USB key, put it a time capsule box with a note: “Don’t open until I’m 25”.

Who knows maybe someday Apple, Facebook, Google or Amazon  will invent a single-use video recorder to record all these predictions and goals, store the video in a time capsule cloud of sort, and can only be accessed at a specific date in the future.
("Dear Older Me Time Capsule" is interesting at any age.)





Birthday Tradition

The morning of my children’s birthday (and my husband’s , too), I bake and/or prepare their wake-up-call-birthday cake. I wake-up everyone who’s home and we gather around the birthday celebrant's bed singing “Happy Birthday”.

I think it’s a great way to start your day - celebrating yet another milestone.







To everyone celebrating his/her birthday: Cheers !




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Comments

  1. Veronica LeeFebruary 28, 2015 at 2:59 AM

    What a wonderful tradition! You write so beautifully, Jenjen.
    Have a great weekend.

    ReplyDelete

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