Recently I went home to visit my parents and went through some of my old things. I found a pile of all of my old high school yearbooks and a few other mementos. What jumped out at me wasn't the overpriced hard bound yearbooks of my high school days but rather a much older set that care from my old daycare provider.

When I was in grade school I attended a home daycare system run by a woman in our neighborhood. She was great at keeping us busy and always had come kind of activity or craft for us to work on once we finished our homework. One of my absolute favorite projects, however, was our yearbook project.

Each year all of my friends and I got to have a book. They were black inside, and we each chose a picture for the cover or drew our own. Mine always had animals on them, but we could choose anything at all. Once we colored the cover the next step was to decide what went in it.

Throughout the year our daycare provider, Dawn, had taken dozens of pictures of each of us. There were photos of talent shows, pool parties, baking, gymnastics, dress up, and pretty much anything else you could think of. She had pictures of us just playing in the yard or putting on puppet shows, and best of all, you got to see your friends in the pictures too and remember all the fun.

She let us look through all the pictures and pick about twenty that we wanted for our books. Once we picked the pictures our part of the project was done. She did the rest of the books on her own so that the end result was a surprise.

Later, we each got our own book with the pictures we had chosen as well as a few others she had added to the selection. In addition to the pictures she added captions on each of the pages that told the story of our antics together. It told a story about the friendships in the pictures and the way our lives had progressed over the past year.

The book was a gift for each one of us to share, and even at only ten years old we loved them. When we got them we always spent the afternoon reading them, sharing them with each other, and comparing notes on what we each got in our books.

Now that I've left home and remain friends with only a handful of the people in those books I'm even more grateful for the yearbooks and the love that she put into them. By high school we can put our adventures on Facebook, but she gave us a gift by recording that part of our lives that we were too young to do ourselves and our parents were not there to see. I hope that someday my children will have the same gift to remember their childhood friends.