Gifts

 

To list and picture all the gifts I've received over the years from my kids is impossible.  

I'm really not sure even what the first one was.  A piece of candy, most likely.  Kids love giving candy as gifts.  It's like grandmas and socks.  

The first one that I remember was a Christmas ornament from a little girl whose name started with a K.  She was a real sweet 1st grader, and when I was working at the Y she gave me (and the rest of the staff) little golden snowmen that had a little clasp to open their bellies with and put little candies inside.  I kept that one.  

I'm not sure which gifts came next.  Too many years, and too many kids have passed by.  Alex used to make me mix CDs when I was mentoring a group of boys at a church I used to go to back in Tucson.  Those CDs enlightened my knowledge of music immensely, and were the soundtrack to many a good time. 

When I worked at the summer camps for CTY, kids would sometimes give me snacks that they had brought along. In Korea, it was mostly candy.

This year, gum's been the big one. Which is odd, since we're not supposed to have gum at school. I always just stash it and say I'll chew it later, but I never touch it. One of my kids was hellbent on giving me second-hand gifts, which would be understandable if our school tuition wasn't $20,000 a year. He gave me a book (pictured), which I'm pretty sure he stole from someone else, and also a used promotional DVD of a skateboard company.

I've had two best gifts of all time so far. One was from a CTY kid I worked with. He had a Rubik's cube (pictured above), and he showed me how to complete the first stage of it. At the end of the camp he gave it to me, and I ended up having it on my desk for the past 4 years. Hundreds of kids have played with it. 

The other best gift I ever got was from a girl who I'd had in my class last year. At the beginning of this year she gave me this t-shirt, which she had made especially for me as a gag gift, and because last year I'd used Justin Bieber in as many examples as possible to help explain things like market economies and human rights issues.