The Best Gift of All!

February 13, 2008 8:49 AM

My son is almost 1.5 – I’d like to make him a life book

I’d like to compile book (hard copy book, electronic file, blog) for my toddler about life - experiences he may never know (because of advances in our lives), anecdotes, general tips about life. I’d like to share it with him (and future offspring) when he is in his young teens (or maybe a wedding present) to hopefully provide written insight from his old man.

I come to you for your insight. Dig deep, share your wisdom and thoughts. Hopefully we’ll get a lot of responses from this one.

Anecdotes, life tips, “if I knew then what I know now…”, When I was in school we didn’t have cell phones…the sky's the limit!

posted by doorsfan to writing & language (4 comments total)

I think it might work better to do in volumes, every few years or something. That way, you can better tailor each volume to whatever stage of life he's going through. Also, that way you can constantly impart on him wisdom that you may not have had 10 years ago. You could start soon, with a pre-school volume. Then one for grade school, puberty, high school, college, first job, marriage, having kids, mid-life, and old-age, with perhaps more in-between. It could become a really important tradition for him and you, that comes about at any of these big life events. Hopefully it'd be something he really anticipates and looks forward to (so don't get lazy).
posted by gauchodaspampas at 9:36 AM on February 13 [1 favorite]

I actually thought about this a while back when Pluto stopped being a planet... It just seemed really weird to think that something I had learned so fundamentally in school would no longer be the case for my kids. So, I guess my suggestion would be to have an "In the News..." type section where you could put important world events... things that really seem to to have historical significance. :o)
posted by Mookbear at 11:59 AM on February 13

I'm sorry to see there's not more responses, and I've little to add as in the past 28 years I've learnt nothing. Your idea is lovely. That being said, a few things that might be interesting:

- A recent boingboing post about things that will never be true for the class of 2011

- Ask MeFi on life altering experiences

- Ask MeFi on happiest life moments


My folks always had two sets of old school encylopedias when I was growing up. One was from maybe the late 60s or early 70s, was just plain wrong on heaps of stuff or far from politically correct. Hilarious reading. The other was from the early 80s and was mostly correct, and harder to find flaws. Not sure if you can still get paper encyclopedias, but it's an oddly great time capsule for what we currently know to be irrefutable fact but will probably be laughed at in years to come.
posted by kaydo at 12:39 AM on February 14

Not sure this is what you are looking for, but I always think I should take pictures of things like moving walkways in airports, DVD rental boxes in Walmarts and Wawas, those earbud cell phones that make you think people are talking to themselves -- new stuff that I know I'll get used to quickly. I never actually do this, but I think it'd be nice to take a picture -- to capture the time when this soon-to-be-boring development was weird and surprising. Might be something you could incorporate into your project for your son.

Also, if you go places with your son, save some tangible reminders of it, so he can actually have the airplane ticket for when he spent that week with his grandparents, the movie ticket stub from the his favorite childhood disney (sorry, pixar) movie, etc. The past seems so unreal until it physically asserts itself -- I wish I had more stuff from my childhood. It seems like an experience that happened to someone else.
posted by bluenausea at 7:35 AM on February 14