Mother’s Day gifts come in all shapes and sizes.

From breakfast in bed to handmade cards, whatever the tradition; today is the day children are showing their mothers how much they are loved.

In Debbie Freeman’s 4-year-old preschool class at First Baptist Church, as part of their Mother’s Day gift, earlier this week students dolled up and dressed to the nines to pose for pictures with the little girls wearing a fur coat that belonged to Freeman’s grandmother and the boys sporting a suit jacket that belonged to a dad.

The children were having their pictures taken as part of their Mother’s Day gifts.

“We are going to put their picture in a frame and then they will wrap the gift on their own,” Freeman said.

The preschoolers also made a booklet for their mom that included a portrait of her.

“She will think it’s good and will be happy when I give it to her,” preschooler Clayton Carr said.

For 45 years, Freeman has been a teacher who has helped facilitate the making of Mother’s Day gifts.

Before teaching in the First Baptist preschool program, Freeman was a teacher with the Vicksburg Warren School District instructing kindergarten through third grade classes.

She laughs when she says she is now teaching her former students’ children.

Through the years, Freeman said some of the gifts her students have made included handprint pictures, and like this year at First Baptist, portraits of their moms.

While the students were busy with their artwork, Freeman said she watched them as they were doing the portraits and is always amazed at how detailed the little ones want their pictures to be.

“One of my students closed his eyes and I said ‘Clayton what are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I just got to remember about my mama’s eyes,’” Freeman said.

“When the children know the gifts are going to their moms they are very detailed, because tiny things matter,” she said.

Another of the students, Freeman said, got down to drawing their mother’s shoes and said he had to put a stick on the shoe.

“And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘High heels Miss Debbie, high heels.’”

As the mother of two daughters, Freeman said, she knows it is these types of gifts that are cherished.

“The gifts that are most special are those that have not been massed produced by the teacher,” she said.

“Anytime I knew they (my daughters) did it themselves, it made me want to keep it. Those are the gifts that I saved, because there is not another one like it, and it was made for me.”

Freeman said she is especially partial to gifts made with handprints because “hands tell a story.”

In Fact, Freeman has filled her Bible with stories, by tracings of her daughters’ handprints over time.

“Sometimes we would be sitting in church and they (Anna Beth [Wyatt] and Lana Claire [Morgan]) would reach over and put their hands in my Bible,” Freeman said.

Then, she said she would trace around their hands.

“I have my girls’ handprints when they started school at South Park. I traced their hands the day they were baptized, the day they went to high school, and the day they went off to college. I even have their hands from the night before they got married,” she said, and added she also dates when the tracings were made.

As they grew, Freeman said it was heartwarming to see them find their younger handprints and then compare them to how much their hands had grown.

Freeman said she wishes every mother would do this and for some it could be the start of a new Mother’s Day tradition.