Happy Mother's Day 2012

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, comrades and friends - but only one mother in the whole world. ~Kate Douglas Wiggin

I've been blessed in my life to be surrounded by many women who were good and lovely and wise. Surpassing them all in courage and selflessness is my own beautiful mother.

I was her first born, and therefore her favorite (hey, it's my blog, I can say what I want.)

There are things I don't know about my mom. I do not know, for example, what my mom's favorite color is or what her favorite music is. Perhaps she was too busy listening to me talk about what I liked as I grew up to have time to tell me what she liked. I do know what her favorite food is: anything she didn't have to cook. And I would hazard a guess that if she didn't have to wash the dishes up after the meal, that would make it a favorite, too.

(Here is a page from my journal. Mom has come with me to my 2nd grade classroom for the school open house, a momentous day.)


My mother is a teacher heart and mind. She taught me and my 10 brothers & sisters all the important stuff while we were growing up. She took us kids on nature walks. She showed us how tadpoles turned into frogs and how caterpillars changed into butterflies. She taught us how to make little dolls out of flowers and acorns. She taught us how to short-sheet our best friend's bed at girl's camp. She taught us to work (and we wickedly disobeyed and hid and didn't do our work.) She taught us to love reading books. She taught us to be happy. She taught us how to recognize promptings of the Holy Ghost.

Someone said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool mom."


When I was a teenager, she always knew when I was headed into trouble. It was her words (and prayers) that saved me when I was perilously close to throwing away all that was best in my life.

My mother sewed my wedding dress & finished a quilt for me--in the heat of the summer while she was pregnant with my littlest brother.

If I end up a good mother to my children, it will only be because I have succeeded at being as much like my mother as possible.

If you counted, there is a brother missing from this picture. He was in Siberia at the time.