Mom's 60Th Birthday

My mom always loves the photo books I make her (via Shutterfly, Snapfish, etc.) You and your family could upload your favorite family photos to an account you establish and create a photo book scrapbook. One week is tight on time, but if everyone pitched in, you could do it! Enjoy your time together and take LOTs of photos of the weekend...and then make her another photo book commemorating the weekend!!

Pictures! If you have time, get together as much of your mom's history in pictures as you can. It's really easy to scan old photos & put together a slide show -- though it takes time. Let it play over the weekend (or even just the first evening you're there). We did something similar for my mom's 80th birthday party & were very surprised how many conversations it started & memories it brought forth.

Also, then see if you can have a photographer take a family picture on the beach that weekend, commemorating your mom and your family.

How thoughtful you are to make this a wonderful time for your mom!

If you don't have one start to compile a family tree. Go back as far as you can on your own, then have Mom help fill it in. If each family member does as much as they can remember you will be able to complete it fairly fast.

Then see if you can find pictures of each person and build a tree with all the branches filled with pictures and names. You can do this on a flat peice paper board or get one of those fake trees and attach the pictures to the leaves on the branches.

Why not make her a book of your families Top 60 Memories of her?

We just celebrated my Mom's 99th on Sunday and my niece made a list of 99 memories specific to her, things like helping learn to baste a hem in sewing, playing card game "authors", teaching her how to save seed from favorite flowers for planting next year, etc. and she read them aloud to family. We all had a good laugh and triggered other memories.

Scrapbook - buy the kind with plastic sleeves and have each person or each family do a page. We did this for Grandma's 90th and it was fabulous. Everyone bought their own background papers and selected photos and little embellishments (stickers, etc.) that went along that theme. Everyone wrote a letter about what they appreciate about her - some were serious & heartfelt, some were amusing, some a combination. The letters were typed and then put on the page with other items (photos, ticket stubs, captions, etc.) Then when we got together, we laid everything out while someone else distracted her, and we assembled the book. We had some scrapbooking supplies and made some captions and other additions to make it hang together. We gave it to her at the party. She has continued to look over that for the past few years and it has really helped her with feeling appreciated and that she's had a great influence on so many of us. We left some blank pages at the back so we could add photos from the celebration. You could all take pictures and then each family could send her an extra page after the reunion.

You could get a blank book and create 60 memories or 60 comments. Everyone could add their own. It helps if you don't overlap too much - so if one person mentions her great apple pies or homemade Christmas gifts, the next person should have some different ones to mention even if he/she has the same memory.

If she's a cook, collect her best recipes and create a cookbook for all the family members. Same thing for any other skill or special interest she has.