Category Archives: mom

mama kat, mom, writer's challenge

Out Of The Ordinary

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More fun from Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge this week! I am going to concentrate on

4.) Describe a moment when you realized your mom was more than just a mom.

My take on this prompt is probably a bit skewed – I gradually learned growing up that other mom’s just weren’t up to the standard of my mom. So I don’t know that there was ever a moment that I realized that my mom was more than a mom. It was more the realization that other moms were so much less than my mom.

Growing up, it seemed to me that there was nothing my mom couldn’t do and very few things that she didn’t know or at least know how to find out. I can remember my shock in first grade when I realized that my friends’ moms didn’t know how to cook just about anything – from catfish fresh from the creek to pheasants newly shot to that unknown cut of beef on special at the grocery store without consulting a cookbook. My confusion was compounded when I also learned that some of those same mothers didn’t know how to sew and make clothes and costumes. I realize now that at least some of those skills were part of survival for our family. But they seemed normal to my brother and I. I honestly have to admit that I was high school before i realized that we lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Mom and dad did such a good job of presenting life as normal that I never questioned it.

At the same time, it seemed that mom always had good books to suggest we read; books that always seemed to be just right for the maturity level we had. It was another shock when I found that most of my friends mothers made no reading suggestions and in fact seemed not to always have a book or two they themselves were reading. Even more bewildering was when I discovered that they didn’t have a library card and their moms didn’t take them to the library regularly. And that there was seldom any of what I would later learn was the Socratic method practiced every day in their homes. Some of that I attribute to the fact my friends had TV and we did not.

In spite of all this, I think the time I truly came to the realization that my mom was something out of the ordinary in the realm of momhood was in high school. As I had been growing up, I had noticed that many family members seemed to come and talk to mom about their life and problems. I assumed that was just part of being family. When I reached adolescence, my friends (and even enemies {*grin*}) started coming to the house, not to visit me, but to talk with mom.

Amazingly, I understood exactly why they did that. Mom has the gift of being able to listen absolutely and non-judgmentally. She will listen and not rise to the bait of provocation. But best of all, after listening and eliciting the full story, she is able to guide and help you to make good decisions, decisions that are good for *you*, decisions that she might not personally agree with, but decisions that are the best for you. And I found that no other mom I knew seemed to have that ability.

So in case you haven’t guessed, I think my mom is pretty special. Compared to the other moms I knew, it seemed to me that my mom was never just a mom. Or perhaps, the definition of mom was just different for us.

blizzard, Boy scouts, meeting, mom

Catching Up

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As you may have noted, I have been remiss in writing much for the last few days. It has been an interesting week here abouts. Some of the things keeping me occupied include a spring blizzard, judging a contest, getting the notes for a committee to form an ambulance district done and …

Tuesday was my last post and I was still a bit rushed. So here is where the time for the rest of the week went.

On Wednesday I did the radio show in the morning and then took care of some things between meetings. I still had the meeting notes from the preliminary meeting Monday of the EMS ambulance district campaign and finance group to put together and get distributed. (We are looking at forming a county wide EMS district. That effects us all and it in particular is something I can’t be too involved with. The problem is that ambulance service is a responsibility of the county under the IGA’s (Inter Governmental Agreements) between the city and the county. The county has been subsidizing a private ambulance service for years. The private service cannot survive on what the county can/will subsidize, so we need to form a county wide district that is a taxing entity to make sure we have the service.) The problem is that the county commissioners cannot be involved since they have to approve the operational plan before the ballot issue can even be considered for inclusion. Since the county would no longer be fulfilling a part of the IGAs, that drags the city in since we will have to set up new terms in the IGAs. Thus I have a secondary conflict of interest and cannot be heavily involved in the effort. So I agreed to chair the introductory meeting and then turn it over to whom ever was selected as chairperson.. That meeting was Monday night and I just today finally got through putting out the meeting notes and turning it all over to the new chairperson. (One item off the must do list.) And I also had to do some grocery shopping for Mom as well.

It turned cold and blowy here late Wednesday, and then went on to be a full scale blizzard Thursday. In fact it was a full scale spring blizzard that closed schools and roads throughout the region.  It snowed and blew for most of the day, so i didn’t have to go out and shovel snow until Friday morning. It looked like this in the middle of the day (around noon) during the storm:

 

Needless to say, the days of 80 degrees we enjoyed less than a week prior were but a memory. It continued all day. Mom called and said don’t bother coming over to bring in her paper and mail, just stay in out of he wind and snow. Another view out onto the back patio before we go:

At least it meant we got some much needed moisture at long last.

Friday I got up early and started shovelling the snow. I did our house, MIL’s house, and Mom’s house, then hurried home an got cleaned up for some more meetings. One meeting was with the parson from Prison Ministries because I am a panelist and speaker at their fund raising diner in April. He wanted to go over the questions that will be posed to the panelists so we can have our acts together. It should be an interesting panel since it will have the sheriff, the chief of police, the associate warden of the prison, myself, and a couple of ex-offenders. Maybe I’ll post the questions here after the event. Then I had a meeting with our tax accountant to get our information turned over so it can be totalled. Along the way, I ran into the auditor doing the annual city audit and that took up a bit of time since the audit report is almost done and will be presented at a ouncil meeting in the next month. (I also had to tell him how cute his daughter was at the Girl Scout proclamation presentation from here. He reported that his daughter wanted to stay for the whole meeting and that they had come to the areement that his daughter could attend with him when he presents the audit report. We’ll see if she finds it as interesting after sitting through the whole shebang. {*grin*})

In the mean time, I have been trying to get all the essays for the “If I Were Mayor” essay contest read. The Colorado Municipal League sponsors a statewide contest and we sponsor a local one with the winners going on to the state contest. Last year one of our students was a winner. We select the winner by panel. The panel consists of me, the city manager, and my writer friend. It is going slower for me this year since I don’t perceive the same quality of writing that I saw last year. (You can read a bit more about our local version here.) Only about ten more essays  to go before we start comparing notes to home in on the winners. (BTW, the topic this year is:

Many youth are not aware of the valuable services that their municipalities (cities and towns) provide: bike paths, recreation centers, police officers, street lights,and crosswalks are all provided by municipal governement. If you were mayor, how would you explain the importance of municipal government to kids in your community?

The contest is for 7th graders and we have great participation here.)

So today I have been reading and pondering. I had to be tracked down by the Boy Scout Troop so I could issue the re-charter check. (I am on the committee and the treasurer.) Once that was handled, it was time to get cleaned up and head over to Mom’s for supper and a round of “Can you get …?” and “Can you move …?” and … Mom is feeling good and doing well – I have my doubts about how cantankerous she might be by the time she gets to go out in the world, but for right now it is going pretty well.

I promise to try to be more regular in the coming days. Thank you all for your emails and calls of concern. It’s OK, I just had a bit too many things to do for a span there. I haven’t even had time to do the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle yet!

mom, weather

Short Report Tuesday

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The temperature reached above 80 degrees here today, well above normal for this time of year. Everyone just keeps hoping we get some moisture. This has been an extremely dry and warm winter, making it hard when we don’t get snow and it is warm enough that the mountains melt out early. That means that all the farmers around here will be hurting unless we get some rain timed just right and in sufficient amounts. Average annual precipitation here is less than 14 inches a year with half of it coming in the form of winter snow. Needless to say, this winter is at less than 0.5 inch. A worryingly dry year.

Taking advantage of the warm weather, Molly and I hit the park for our daily miles. (Molly was willing to join me today since the period of mourning L leaving was over at about noon when the squirrels got frisky.) I couldn’t believe the number of young mothers and kids at the playground. A literal explosion out of the house and into the park with the warmer weather. Another month or so and the young ladies from the college will be out sunbathing in the parks. That is always an interesting time of the year since it serves to preview what the prevailing swimsuit styles will be this summer at the city pool. Somehow, the older one gets, the less enthusing following swimsuit fashion becomes. It’s not like I spend a lot of time at the pool ogling like a slobbering teenage boy anymore. Besides, back then L was a lifeguard so there was something of interest for me to ogle!

Mom continues to do well and may be able to return home by the weekend depending on the therapists evaluation of the readiness of her house. She is starting to get antsy to be home. She got the surgical dressing changed and saw the orthopedic surgeon today. So it was a busy day for her, going over to the doctor’s office and then having physical therapy. When I got over to the nursing home a bit after 5pm, she and a few friends were sitting outside, relaxing and visiting in the late day sun.  She will still be in a wheel chair and unable to put any weight at all on her leg for at least another 6 weeks, but at least she will be at home. That will make her happy.

Other than that, not a lot to report today. Time to get some real work done so I can get ready to mosey down to the radio station for the weekly show in the morning. 6am comes early, but at least it is light out since the spring to daylight savings time.

donor, mom, museum, relatives

Thursday for the Odd

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Today was an odd day out here on the plains. The wind was blowing and the temperature rose early and then began to drop in anticipation of possible snow on Saturday. The wind was especially noticeable at the museum as it drove the old windmills and wind powered farm equipment to clatter like demons. Made one heck of a lot of noise. I was at the museum for a meeting with a donor.The city owns and operates a very highly rated western museum, concentrating on the history of the area and the Overland Trail which passes along the edge of town. That makes us a bit unusual for a city of our size as not many cities own and operate a museum, and ours has a collection of the original buildings of many types and farm equipment and a one room school plus a lot of lore, artifacts, and history from the area. All spread out on a several acre campus by the river.

The meeting at 2pm was at the request of the donor who wanted the mayor to accept his gift of the final issue of the Rocky Mountain News to go with the archive first issue of the Rocky Mountain News from 150 years ago. The museum also has one of the early news printing presses, so this adds a bit to the collection, putting a capstone on it in a sense. If you are really unlucky, you will see a picture of me with the donor, me sitting on an old printers stool (about 1 foot tall) with my knees about my ears in front of the early printing press, looking like we are examining the paper hot off the press. I say that because the reporter/photographer from one of the local papers was there covering the event. The donor spent many years with the Rocky, and I think this  also allowed him to cap off his association with the Rocky.

After finishing up at the museum, I went home and changed and headed over to Mom’s house. Mom is undergoing surgery next week that will confine her to a wheel chair for at least the next 6 weeks, so it was time to remove some doors and get the handicap accessories in place. Mom has been spending most of the week getting things arranged so that she can do everything she needs from a wheelchair. Along the way she has been creating a list of things for me to do when I came over today. It is interesting all the things you take for granted when you are up and about versus sitting in a wheelchair. So a bit later I had the list for today done and the doors stored away. Of course, I also had to get my plant watering lesson for the day since I will be watering Mom’s virtual forest of indoor plants. I think Mom’s afraid I will kill them – probably a reasonable worry!

Once we got that done, we headed to a local diner to eat. A number of our relatives seemingly had the same idea. Some background: Mom’s younger sister G died some years ago due to cancer. G’s kids are somewhat younger than me (I was the oldest grandkid) and I used to babysit them from time to time as we were growing up and G was still here. Mom is the honorary grandmother to G’s kids’ kids. (Parse that Emily Post.) G’s three kids all have names that begin with M and one of them follows this blog and all three live here. The one who reads the blog requested to be known herein as M, so I’ll call her brothers M1 and M2 just to avoid any claims of originality. M and her two kids and M1 and his wife and two kids all showed up at various times while we were eating. I am known as Uncle Dan to M and M1’s kids. Mom and I got to see and talk to them as they waited for their food to come out. They’d come over and sit and talk with us and then return to their tables to eat.

It was nice to see the kids. M’s oldest and M1’s oldest are both 7th graders and seem to be shooting up like the proverbial weeds. There are all the signs of emergent teenager making an appearance. M1 described it as the 12 going on 16 age. I have read to some of the kids’ school classes at various times for Reading Across America and other programs. You haven’t seen excited until you get to their classroom and they get to introduce the mayor as their “Uncle” Dan. As everyone got ready to leave, Mom and I got hugs from the kids. It’s been a while since L and I had a pre-teen threatening to turn into an teenager at any moment, so it’s always good to be reminded of what they are like. Especially when one can then go home and not worry about it. (Just kidding!)

Time to get ready for tomorrow. Someday I’ll have to write about babysitting M, M1, and M2. M threatened to kill me if I wrote about it tonight, so I’ll have to wait until later. {*grin*} Of course she also claimed it exposed how old I am too. I thought the white hair already did that.