I Heart My Mom!!

I was looking at some of my prior posts and I realized that I haven't written anything about my mom. Seeing as that the love holiday is coming up, I thought I would do a little shout-out to the woman to brought me into this world (and says that she can take me out of it...hmmm...). I love her. She is so freakin' amazing...yeah, I said it...FREAKIN' AMAZING! :) Mom, I really hope you read this!!! ha ha ha.

A couple of the greatest things I admire about my mom is her determination and honesty--there are lots of others but those are two that stand out to me right now.

Funny story about my mom's honesty. So I work with some people that grew up with my mom and one of the guys one day came up to me, shortly after I started working at the firm and asked how my mom was doing. I hadn't even known he knows her. He then told me that he had always admired my mom's unfailing honesty. He appreciated her sincere integrity. I'm not sure what experience he, or my mom, had to cement this fact in his mind. But I appreciated it nonetheless. When I got home, I asked my mom about it and told her the story. Her response, "Uh, what? That is the quality he picked out? Why??" It was pretty funny. But true! I've always appreciated her integrity--even times when I didn't want to, but until that moment I hadn't realized it.

The other things I want to mention is my mom's determination. When Mom sets her mind to something-it happens. There is no discussion about it. She always wanted us to be a close family. And we are. My siblings are my best friends and I owe that to my mom. She also always made sure that we would look at both sides to anything we were going through. I learned perspective from her.

One experiance that I always think of was a "Spontaneous Weekend" my mom took us on to Columbia, CA & Yosemite. We didn't get many vacations with her growing up--but the ones we did have were AMAZING! I think they were our favorites growing up--well they were mine, that's for sure. Well, the Spontaneous Weekend lives in infamy in our family because of several things that happened. One being that Mom called it a "Spontaneous Weekend." Mom doesn't do spontaneous. Things have to be planned and planned WELL in advance--which was a very good thing for us growing up. But I wanted some freedom with trip planning--like my bestfriend's family who would decide Friday morning that they were going to Utah for the weekend.

So my mom came up with her perfect solution. She planned a spontaneous weekend. I didn't know that was possible. She planned the general constructs of the trip weeks in advance and researched things we could do and the spontenaity came in the fact that us kids could pick what we wanted to do. FREEDOM!! Well as much as we were going to get--fortunately it was enough for us.

It was a super fun trip and we learned that Cait can never be navigator again--we got lost. We also experienced the Hershey's factory before it closed. And we had a picnic in snow. Well it was light snowing flurries and we ate lunch in it. It was wonderful! :)

I appreciate so much about my mom. She has done and sacrificed so much for me. And I hope that I never under-appreciate her.

Well, I love my mom. 'nuff said!

Mom, Caitlin, & I