Shared Experiences with my Mother

One of my favorite parts of motherhood has been watching my children grow up with my mother in their lives too. They are lucky enough to have her right in our neighborhood, so from birth she has been pushing the carriage, making snacks, doing school projects, and showing them all the things she loved to do with me.

 

 

With Mother’s Day around the corner, I thought it would be fun to share some our favorite shared experiences, which will now live on for yet another generation because they have become so important to my children, too.  If I had to distill down to the experiences my children and I will remember forever, with "Lulu," as they call her, it would go like this: “Maine, Tea, Art, Christmas, Palm Beach”.

 

 

As my kids get older, and every school meeting becomes about social media and how to handle iPhones and growing up in our digital world, I can't help but notice that all of these wonderful, consistent, year to year memories are either DOING something together or BEING together outdoors...  Here’s to three generations of playing monopoly, lunching at Bergdorf’s, and hiking mountains!

 

 

Maine!  Maine is a very important shared experience that has been passed on from my mother, to me, to my children.  We have been going there for 3 generations now and we get to spend the most amount of time together, when we are there in the summer.  My oldest son was born at the end of May, so we headed straight up to Maine in June to spend time on the island where I grew up in the summers.  Mom used to push me around Long Pond, and now we have pushed all three of my children, and now they walk themselves!  We hike mountains, pick blueberries, make blueberry pies, go square dancing, go for popovers, and play Monopoly together every summer.  We even added a dog Charlie who now walks around with us.  There is a place we go for lunch in Southwest Harbor every summer, since the kids were babies, and we always take a picture on the long dock.

 

 

Hiking in Maine!

 

 

 

Monopoly

 

 

 

Picking Blueberries

 

 

 

Making Blueberry Pie

 

 

 

Tea! Whether dressed up in New York City, or sweaty from a long hike in Acadia at Jordan Pond House, I grew up loving tea with my mom as a special treat.  Now we take my daughter to the same tables at the Carlyle and Bergdorf’s and she loves it just as much.

 

 

 

Art! My mother is an amazing art teacher- she taught for 34 years at Spence- and so she has instilled a love of painting and art projects in me, and my children.  Every time there is a crafty project to do for school, we call Lulu!  She started with them young- taking Barrett to paint pottery when he was only a few months old.

 

 

 

Palm Beach!  Another thing we love together is Palm Beach - baby pools, oceans, and the macaroons we eat afterward!  We have so many happy memories going in and out of the little house and swinging on the swings- with my kids just like my mom used to do with me.

 

 

 

Christmas! My mother collected beautiful special ornaments and I grew up putting them on our Christmas tree and looking forward excitedly each year to carefully unwrapping them in the (decades old) tissue paper they lived in during the summer.  Now, she has passed those same ornaments on to me, and we carefully add a few special ones each year, and my children recognize and love the stories about all the ornaments and where they came from.

 

 

 

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers and grandmothers who pass down special experiences together in their families.