I don’t have many photos of my mom it turns out, because most of the time she is the one on the other side of the lens.  I have tons of awesome photos taken by her.  She decided a few years ago to start a photo blog and made a promise to herself that she would post every day and she does (or pretty nearly): andahiveofsilveryBees.blogspot.com

One of the things I love the best about my mom is that she is a keen and thoughtful observer.  Observer of everything.  Nature, wildlife, people, art, language.  If you visit her blog, you will see this.  She is never just “there” doing nothing, but is always in the moment seeing something a different way, thinking about something, learning something or just filing away a bit of trivia for future reference.  This also gives her an amazing intuition about things. She just sees how things fit together, or something reminds her of something else and she pulls seemingly random answers out of the air.  My sisters and I have a joke that “Who needs Google, just call mom!”

Another thing I love is her confidence.  I cannot ever imagine my mom hopping up on a chair and shrieking because she saw a mouse; she was the one who fed the manta rays at the aquarium and got licked by the giraffe.  She has absolutely no problem with answering a question with “I don’t know”, which is usually followed by “But let’s see if we can find out.”  If she sees something is not working, she finds a way to fix it, even if that means getting her hands dirty (both literally and figuratively).  She has never once told me that I couldn’t do something, because I think she truly believes that anything is possible if you just think about it in the right way.

It’s her birthday today and I am certain that her students (she teaches highschool) gave her all kinds of hell about being an old fossil. The thing is that they mean that in the nicest way possible, because secretly they think she’s a super-weird-awesome-fun-favorite-teacher-extra mom-makes-you-feel-good-about-yourself-kind of old fossil.  They are right. ;)