Hey, Mom.

Since your Mother’s Day gift is already late, here’s a list of reasons I love you (basically I’m hoping this shiny post *hey, look over here!* will distract you long enough to forget the fact that you haven’t gotten my present in the mail yet . . . too obvious?):

+ You still answer my phone calls when I’m in the grocery store and can’t find something. (“Uh, hi, Mom. Artichoke hearts.” “Probably in aisle 3.” “Righto.”)

+ You’re always cold, and I’m always cold, and when I’m cold, I think, “I bet Mom would be cold right now too.” And you usually are.

+ You come to my house and help my rearrange dishes in the kitchen for the 42nd time that month so that Chris doesn’t have to keep asking, “Honey, if you were the spoons, where would you be . . . today?”)

+ You hem my pants. (Apparently using tape isn’t as great as I thought.)

+ You said the phrase, “That is not how we act toward our sisters” at least 3,592 times in my childhood, and it worked . . . because you actually meant it.

+ You make nachos for me every time we’re together. Nachos with so much cheese my arteries lay down on the side of the road and die, also known as, nachos-just-how-I-like-them.

+ You are one of the soundest theologians I know. You love Jesus, the Lord’s Supper, the Church Fathers, and the liturgy.

+ You love to laugh, and I love to see you laugh so hard you really do cry. #winning

+ You adore smooching babies, proof you were made to be a mom from the very beginning.

+ You put up with Dad. (Hi, Dad. Just kidding. But seriously.)

+ You threatened to wash my mouth out with soap once when I was a little girl, but you never did. While I am grateful, this incident also reminds me not to mess with you.

+ You made us girls suffer through 4-H, baking bread and sewing outfits at midnight the night before the county fair, and while we muttered under our breath at the time, all that we learned sure is coming in handy now. (It’s too bad we only retained about .002 % of what you taught us.)
+ You once spent a whole day making me a Cabbage Patch doll cake for my birthday. (You never did it again, probably because it took so long you were ready to slice up a real Cabbage Patch and just get it over with, but it’s one of my earliest memories, and boy, is it sweet.)

+ You taught us the beauty of the perfectly roasted marshmallow, and when ours burned, you declared you liked your marshmallows charred better anyway and shared your golden brown ones with us instead.

+ You are the reason our friends always wanted to hang out at our house. Not your daughters. You.

+ You sat up with me at night when I couldn’t sleep during the Abysmal Case of the Never-Ending Chicken Pox Horror Show of 199something. I was scarred (literally) for life. But having to deal with five-year-old me probably scarred you too.

+ You love having people in your home–widows, pastors and their wives, kids, singles. Your way of showing them you care is to make tasty food and serve it them on pretty dishes. And it works. Proof: Everyone wants to come back.

And so do I. Because you’re just that wonderful.

I could keep this up all week–reminding you of the time I threw a wooden giraffe scooter at Lauren and it scraped red paint off the handle and onto your white wall.

Or the time I fell down the steep stairs and blamed it on Kellee when she was nowhere around.

Or the time I . . .

Cancel that. You’re the kind of mom who doesn’t have time to be sitting around reading blogs all day. You’ve got a whole lot of awesomeness to get to, and I’m not about to keep you from it.

Love you, Mom.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Adriane 

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