Way back in 2013, I started Mother's Day notebooks for each of my kids. I asked Joe to interview them and write down their answers exactly and I keep them in notebooks with all the pictures they've drawn of me and all of the special little “I love my mom” cards they give me. These two notebooks are among my treasured possessions.
The Mother's Day interviews we have used since the very beginning look like this:
I printed out 6 for each girl when we first started, so I ran out after last year.
When Mother's Day rolled around in 2019, I went looking for the PDF and couldn't find it on my computer and couldn't find it on the internet. There were lots of pins of the interview sheet, but they were all spammy sites and the PDF was exactly nowhere to be found.
Wanting my standard interview, I went ahead and recreated it using similar graphics and questions. I will freely admit that this interview is not my design, but since it's no longer available as a download, I feel okay about recreating and sharing it.
I hope you'll print out the interview and do it with your kids. Do what I have done and store them in a notebook in page protectors so that you'll have them to look back on for many years to come.
Materials needed:
- Mother's Day interview form
- 3-ring binder (I have one per kid. Also, I generally prefer Better Binders from Staples, but these notebooks are small, only 1/2″ binders, and Better Binders don't come that small. Also, these don't get a lot of action and so don't need to be super amazing binders.)
- Page protectors
5 Tips for better Mother's Day interviews
- Sit in a quiet place out of earshot of other children. You don't want the second child's answers to be the same as the first child's, and if they overhear, they are likely to repeat.
- Let them do something while you talk. It often helps if the child is drawing (a picture of you makes a wonderful addition to the notebook!) or playing with a quiet toy. It makes the child feel less pressure.
- Write down their answers EXACTLY as they say them. Trust me, in 5 years, you will be glad you wrote down “her gives me cookies” instead of “she gives me cookies.” You will look back on those mistakes with a happy tear in your eye. I still have the interviews from when Allie was 3, and they make me so nostalgic and happy to read.
- Encourage her. This year, Allie had tremendous difficulty with my age. I don't know why because she knew it last year, but she just couldn't remember and didn't want to be wrong. So when she finally settled on an age (5 years older than I am!), I thanked her for working so hard to figure it out and told her that was a great guess.
- Ask probing questions. This interview is an amazing way to get inside your kids' heads. So when she says she wants to go to Paris with you, ask what she wants to do there or why she picked that spot. You might be surprised at the answer you get and it will give you more to write down than a one-word answer.
Even though Grace (who will be 12 in a couple of weeks) has grown up quite a bit since we started, her answers still delight me. She said my favorite food is brownies (true) and that we want to go to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios (also true).
I hope you'll print out a few of these interviews, one for each of your kids, and that you'll take 10 minutes today to fill them out. I promise that you will treasure their answers for many years to come.
© 2019, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.