Mom

My side of the family doesn't really do holidays. But Brad's side (not including Brad) thinks that birthdays and mother's day are akin to a religious holiday that simply must be celebrated or you risk family expulsion. My MIL is probably going to put some obnoxious comment on here in retort but that's cool, she knows I love her. But since I have a blog and Mother's Day is almost here, (and my MIL should have her M-Day card soon so she's covered), I figured I should dedicate a post to my own mom.

As a kid, I was pretty much in awe of how much she could accomplish in a day. I rarely saw her sitting down unless it was in the evening and Dad was watching Star Trek or something. In the summers it seemed like she was always mowing or string trimming something. It'd be a tropical 95 degrees and she'd come in with flecks of grass all over her sweating from head to toe and I'd hide because she made me look like a lazy bum. If she wasn't mowing, she was in the garden which was HUGE and she had every single year. We had a 20 acre or so peach orchard for a time that we also managed during the summer which, for the record, my mom hated because she, like me, really isn't a people person and people that buy peaches, apparently, are some of the rudest. I think she also didn't like how much the orchard literally consumed our lives during the summer months. Staying on top of it was a never-ending task. We loved the peaches however, and my mom is an expert canner. I've only ever canned refrigerator pickles. She canned all kinds of things from tomatoes to green beans to chicken and guinea meat... ah guineas.
 I told you my family had strange hobbies didn't I? We hatched a batch of chicken eggs every other year or so to have laying hens but one year my mom thought it would be neat to get some guinea eggs because she'd heard guineas were good watch-dogs.

They were cute little baby buggers but those guineas were kind of a nuisance.
For one thing, you couldn't catch them. They are not just smarter than chickens I think, but faster too. So we could never catch them in order to clip their feathers to keep them from flying out of the pasture. So they were almost always out, roaming free. The funniest thing about guineas was watching them chase bugs. I don't mean bugs crawling on the ground but dragon flies and beetles flying around. They're like bug sharks, stopping at nothing to try and catch a bug. And their most telling characteristic is the sound they make, "Buckwheat! Buckwheat! Buckwheat!" (emphasis on the "wheat" syllable) And they were uuuugly too.
The guinea hobby is just the kind of thing my parents did though.

My mom is also a self-taught kind. There were many things that she decided she wanted to try and then she figured out a way to do it. Once she had been wanting a food dehydrator for a long time so she built one. I mean literally built one out of wood and light bulbs and little fans. She made the dyhydrator screens too. And so we had our first tastes of fruit rolls-ups... the real fruit kind. And beef and deer jerky. I'm pretty sure my sister has inherited my mom's dehydrator and she still uses it. But mom always tried to figure out ways to do things herself that she either couldn't afford to purchase or thought she could do a better job. We had quite the horseback riding hobby growing up and she made all of our riding attire. She made horse blankets and saddle pads, show gear, and when my dad brought home this old rusty horse trailer, she and my dad refurbished it.

Cake-decorating is among my mom's skills as well. She has made dozens of cakes over the years for people from birthdays to weddings. I spent many days as a kid licking icing out of mixing bowls, eating cake scraps and having one of my mom's favorite treats, graham crackers and leftover icing.

I learned a lot from my mom, sewing being one of those. She encouraged us early to sew by ourselves and I think at around 8 or so, I was making Barbie clothes. I also learned how to garden from her although my older sister kind of takes the cake on "greenest thumb" in our family. I learned how to refinish furniture because my mom let me pick out a headboard from a thrift store for my bed it wasn't the color I wanted so she said it would be a cinch to refinish in the color I wanted. She also learned how to upholster and all of our furniture growing up were pieces she acquired for free and reupholstered. My mom always made things seem do-able. I've come to recognize that most people are pretty daunted by tasks they've never done before but my mom taught me that if you just spend some time thinking and reading about it, you can figure out how to do anything yourself. See this:

This is my house in NC where my mom installed this carpeting and the laminate flooring you see behind it in the closet. She also installed the doors in the picture as well as the storm door on the front of the house.  "Do it yourself" is just how she rolls. I'm grateful for that attitude she passed on to me. She also instilled the desire to be informed and self-taught. Long before the organic foods trend, my parents taught us that the best kind of food is the food you grow in your own garden and the best chicken is the chicken that scratches through horse manure and eats bugs. So I had an awareness early on of how things were supposed to be.

I love how my mom always gets IN there and does it. She was never a frail woman and wasn't afraid to get dirty. Honestly, I always felt like my mom was more capable and skilled than my dad who spent his evenings and weekends puttering with things. He built plenty and undertook lots of projects but my mom had an array of skills that were always apparent. She also put a lot more thought into her projects whereas my dad was more of the "jimmy-rig-it" type a lot of the time. She never let heavy lifting or grease or dirt get in her way. As a result of her example, I don't mind getting sweaty or putting my nose to the grindstone.

Mom's an excellent writer. Oh man is she a good writer. I wish my writing were as beautiful as hers. She should be published. *hint hint mom* I may not have her skill but I guess I have the same love and appreciation for it that she does.

A few of my mom's strange quirks are manual reading and navigating. My mom reads every manual for anything she ever buys from front to back. If she gets a new blender, she reads the manual and follows the instructions precisely. If she get's a drill, she's reading the instruction and care manual before she ever uses it. If she gets a car? Yep, you better believe she's reading the whole manual first. And she loves maps and navigating and trip-planning. For that reason, I let her plan out our trip when we drove together from NC to ND. She just digs that stuff. I kind of get it though. When I was a kid and there was no GPS, I would hold the map on long car trips and just get a kick out of knowing exactly where we were on the map at all times. She's the same way.

We both have this drive to need to know. If something applies to us, we need to know everything we can about it. Now, of course, I just Google it and read up. My mom would go to the library and actually get books. Ah how times have changed.

And currently my mom has taken up knitting. And in the true style of my mother, she doesn't just knit, she immerses herself in everything about knitting from studying up on how to raise Alpacas to how to make yarn from their wool (or is it just called hair?). I'm sure she's going to be amazing at it. Because she's amazing at everything she takes up.

Plus, my mom has the coolest grandma hair, doesn't she? I hope my hair greys that beautifully.

My mom has greatly influenced the person I am today and I'm grateful for this opportunity to recognize it and appreciate it. I guess Mother's Day really is useful, isn't it?