brainstorming for saturday

Reasons I love my mom:

1. My mom loves and advocates for each of her kids as if they were her only child.
2. My mom has a strong testimony that she is a child of God and that Heavenly Father loved his children enough to restore his power on the earth in these latter days.
3. My mom taught me to love flowers and that I could never have enough "pretty". When I was little she would let me help plant the pony packs, take the hats of the California poppies, weed the flowers while patiently explaining that the flowers with the lacy leaves are larkspur not weeds and how to dig a hole.
4.My mom took us kids on camping trips all of the time to strawberry and everywhere else when we were kids and inadvertently taught us how to play with fire and how to be tough.
5. Every big decision I have made in my life seems to have been influenced by my mom. She'd tell me what she thought I should do and it would give me the courage to pursue my goal.
6. From about age zero, my mom took us to the library to check out books. She read to all of us kids all the time and fostered our love of reading.
7. Food = love. As Amanda says our chubby thighs are evidence of that.
8. My mom always and I mean ALWAYS woke up with us kids and made us breakfast each morning before school. We maybe ate cold cereal once every two weeks. The rest of the time it was french toast, waffles, eggs and hash browns you name it.
9. My mom loved to travel and wasn't selfish by just going with her and my dad we took to whole family. Whether it was a 7,000 mile trip in three weeks with 8 kids (three of them under 3) in a 7 passenger van visiting all of the church history sights, washington dc, new york and niagra falls or the other 30+ states she took us to. Instead of taking her trip to Europe she sent two of her daughters. How unselfish can you get?
10. Because of our extensive traveling our mom taught us to love culture and museums. She took us to see American Gothic, The Irisis, The girl with the watering can, just as a start. She also taught us to love classical music and old historical places.
11. My mom helped each of us learn a musical instrument. I think she probably spent of years worth of time taking me to cello lessons, Saturday group lessons, mys practice, concerts, recitals, and sitting with me while I practiced at age 6. And on top of that she taught each of us to play the piano. When she taught me she had me pay her five dollars a lesson which she would give me and then tell me to stand outside the front door and knock, then she would let me in, I would pay her the five dollars and she would put it in this red tin box that sat in the piano seat. Little did I know the money for my lessons went into a bank account that later paid for my first nice cello.
12.My mom taught us to love old black and white movies, period movies and foreign films with subtitles.
13. My mom taught me that saturday's were project days where we would paint a room or clean up the backyard or plant flowers.
14. My mom taught us to study the scriptures by helping us draw pictures in our book of mormons to help explain what was happening and by having us sit on sundays around her chair while she read stories from the ensign, new era and friend.
15. My mom used the time she spent with me in the car driving places to teach me valuable lessons and help make suggestions of what she thought I would be good at and what I should do with my life. Sometimes I thought she was lecturing the wrong kid and that I was just the target practice before the real lecture but it always helped me anyways.

Thats all for now.I'll have more later. My mom rocks.