For Mother's Day my kids gave me a great gift. They would take the entire bookcase of home videos and have them transferred to DVDs. I tried not to get too excited. My kids are 30, 34 and 35 and I still have a "gift certificate" they gave me twenty five years ago promising all kinds of goodies that never materialized.

Lo and behold, my daughter scooped up all the videos and brought them to a guy to transfer. Friday night she brought the first batch of DVDs. We laughed, we cried, and almost missed our dinner reservation because we didn't want to stop.

Keep taking those videos! Someday, like me, you will be so happy to have them. They are so much better than snapshots for bringing back the departed people, pets or memories. There was great grandma sitting on the sofa, so short her legs didn't reach the floor. There was grandpa singing "Bless this House" at our housewarming party. There were two generations of cats and Sasha, the golden retriever, swimming in San Francisco Bay.

Don't wait for the big events like birthdays and holidays to take videos. Some of our favorites are the ones we took of everyday life.