Your Kids Will Remember

 When my kids were little, DH and I tried really hard to live on just his income so that I could be home with the kids.  Sometimes this didn't work, and I would take a job for a while. But often, the cost of child care took the vast majority of my paycheck, and when DH would be traveling for his job and I not only needed a day time babysitter, but a second (typically teenaged) babysitter to pick up my kids from the normal babysitter before 6:00 p.m. so I didn't get charged exorbitant late fees for not getting there on time we questioned the sustainability of that system for our family.

So, for the most part, after DD2 was born, I was a stay at home mom. Money was tight.  We were creative.

One thing we did, several Christmases running, was to make homemade gifts for the kids to give to their teachers, both at school and at Sunday School.  If the kids could participate in the making, they did.  This was, afterall, their gift to their teacher(s).  It was cheaper than buying a token gift, and we didn't even have to leave home to find the right thing. 

Cookie in a jar mixes were quite popular back then (late 1990s- early 2000s), and I found a lot of them by searching online and through borrowing recipe books from the local library.  My kids would choose a recipe or two for that year, we would make sure the ingredients were in our pantry, and then they would get to work reading recipes, measuring ingredients and packing them in the jars in the correct order.  Then they would hand-write labels for the jars with instructions on how to make the cookies.  We even had a catchy name we'd put on the labels:  Four Kids in the Kitchen.

Years later, when I would run into my kids' former teachers who had been recipients of these gifts, they would mention how much they had appreciated the jar mixes (which they could make any time, not have to eat right away at Christmas), and what a unique gift it had been--obviously something the child had put time into.

Fast forward to Christmas 2020.  DS1 and his family arrived to our (pre-quarantined so we could safely pull it off) family Christmas gathering at this little place here with a box full of jars.  Each jar had a printed label on it, signed by K3, Toad, and Rascal.  Together with their dad, those three grandkids had made cookie in a jar mixes for DH & I, DS2, DD1 & Honorary Son, and DD2.

It was a touching gift for me, who was happy to see that DS1 had drawn on that part of his childhood and passed the experience on to his own kids.  And my other kids all had fun reminiscing about when they were little, making the jar mixes themselves, and whose hands fit into the mouth of the jars therefore making them the designated tamper when the ingredients threatened to not fit.