Mother's Day: Gift Ideas

Mother's Day (the American one-and graduation for Sewanee C'16!!) is coming up this Sunday. While we definitely should celebrate the loved ones in our lives more than just once a year, I do like occasions like these because they just give us another excuse to pamper those we love.

Here are some gift ideas for the special mums in your life! Any ideas you have? I'd love to hear about them!

1) A day off: Mothers are known for being perpetually busy- I know my own is fully capable of conjuring up a busy day (there's so much to be done!) when she really should be relaxing! Here's a day when you can tell your mother (or a mother in your life, really) to just take things easy. It's a Sunday, so she should (hopefully) be off work. Bring her breakfast in bed, schedule a massage/spa session for her, take her for a hike- basically, plan anything that wouldn't require much effort on her end! She's certainly deserved it.

2) A video celebrating her: Here's a fun way to celebrate the special mums in your life- get together people who know her well, including her children, and make a video telling her why you think she's such an awesome mum and what you love about her! She's bound to love it, and will treasure it for years to come.

3) A time capsule: This one might require a little advance preparation, but it'd be a fun gift to open! Collect snippets and mementos of her time as a mother- pictures of her babies' milestones, drawings her children have done for her- anything really! Even a rock from a hike she enjoyed with her kids counts. Add notes from her children (if they're too young, scribbles/handprints work too), and get as creative with the packaging as you'd like. When she is gifted the time capsule, you get to tell her how many years later she gets to open it.

4) Memories: What better way to preserve memories of motherhood than by giving her pictures she can see AND touch? Have you ever met a mother who ISN'T happy to look at pictures of her children? Using an online service (like PerfectPics in Kenya) to create photobooks, fridge magnets, picture mugs, canvases and other such products is fast and easy, and is definitely worth it!

5) Food: It's a rare person who doesn't like food- and I'm willing to bet that the mum you're celebrating isn't one of them! Whether you put together a picnic basket, and set off to a place like Karura Forest, or have her kids cook her something special, or take her to a nice restaurant (if you're in Nairobi, Zen Garden, About Thyme or 360 Degrees Pizza are just a few of the ones I'd recommend), she's sure to love it!

6) Adopt a pet: Mother's hearts are notoriously large, and this love doesn't just stop at her human children! KSPCA Kenya have a long list of cats and dogs that are looking for their forever homes. Important: Only gift a gift like this if you know that the household will be able to care for and love the pet for the duration of its lifetime. Pets are not a responsibility to be taken lightly- indeed, they are part of the family.

7) Give her a foster elephant: Conversely, if she is an animal lover, but isn't able to physically care for a pet at the moment because of space/time/other constraints, why not consider fostering an elephant for her? The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust does a lot of great work with orphaned elephants- and has lots that you can choose to foster!

8) A monetary gift: And no, before you ask, I'm not talking about giving her money. Parenthood definitely not cheap, and so, depending on who the gift is from, a contribution toward something for the kids would definitely be appreciated! This is an especially useful gift when it's coming from extended family and friends to a mother of young children. Maybe offer to pay for an after school activity for a year? Or set up an account that family and friends can deposit money into that'll go toward education expenses when the kids are older? Perhaps it doesn't have to be monetary in the literal sense- offering to babysit two or three times a month so that she can have some much needed me time works too!

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Keeping Memories Alive

7,836. A seemingly random number, but it's not. It's actually the exact number of images I have in my camera roll right this second- and it's bound to go up by the end of the day. Between sharing pictures among family members spread out across countries and continents, cute forwards, and pictures for my blog, my camera roll somehow spun out of control, and now, if I want to find a particular picture from a special occasion, I have a pretty hard time with it! I've also experienced, on occasion, the surprise of going through my camera roll to find a particular picture, and stumbling across others which I had completely forgotten I'd taken!

I know from chatting with friends and family that I'm not the only one who has this problem. We may be the generation who's taking the most pictures- but we're also the generation who's enjoying them the least. Perhaps with ease of access has come lack of appreciation- no more carefully planning a shot, as we can just take lots from different angles, and then pick our favourite ones later. I'm definitely guilty of this, although having used film for photography (recently) and having had to actually develop this film myself has given me a greater appreciation for the nuances of photography, and its importance in preserving memories.

Technology may have advanced, but I think we still need to see AND feel something to enjoy it to the fullest. This is why I'll always prefer real books over reading them on a laptop or tablet, and why it's so enjoyable to look at pictures in an album as opposed to on a screen. Traditional albums, as they were, are almost obsolete. In the time it takes to print pictures (or get them printed), buy an album, and then manually put in the pictures, we could do so much else. However, the fact remains that most people don't know that they have other options! And so they continue either taking hundreds of pictures without fully enjoying them, or selecting some and going through the painstaking process of putting them into a traditional album.

I found this quote from an interesting article I stumbled across online, that talked about the relationship of human memories to photographs:

It’s pretty clear that there is a connection between human memory and the photographs we take. Simply put, a photo is information about past light that we can perceive in present time. Similarly, memories are the affects of our past experiences on our present self. Photographs can serve as memory storage and, when viewed, can activate memory recall.

When I was in the U.S., it was easy enough to find services that did photobooks and canvases, and they were affordable enough that they could be done as often as one liked them. One advantage of services like these is that these photobooks, canvases and other products can be duplicated and recreated- meaning that they can simultaneously be enjoyed by family and friends across the world.

Moving back to Kenya, I automatically assumed that we had no such service, and because of this, didn't even bother to look! So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that we do. PerfectPics has been in the market for a few years now, and are the first and (at time of writing) only service in the country that does online photobooks. What I like about PerfectPics is not just that they identified a niche market and capitalised on it, but that they identified a problem- they had a very clear 'why'- much like I have done above, and set about to help people preserve and enjoy their memories.

So if you're in Kenya, and you're writing to relatives abroad to get you photobooks when they next come to Kenya, you don't need to anymore. Rest assured that there exists such a service in Kenya that truly cares about the memories you make!