Today is a Very Exciting Day

Why, you ask?  Today my mom flies in for Greenleigh’s birthday party.  She will be here until Monday, and I will no doubt be in tears when she leaves.  We don’t get to see each other a lot.  Maybe 4-5 times per year on a good year, and it’s looking like it might only be 3 times this year.  It’s hard being far from family, but really makes me look forward to her visits.  Here are just a few of the reasons visits from my mom are awesome:

• My mom understands that I’m a procrastinator and loves me anyway.  This quality used to drive her crazy when I was in middle/high school, but now she’s learned to embrace it.  She knows that tomorrow will be a crazy last-minute day of party planning and has already asked several times what she can do to help.
• She’s an optimist.  When I hand her a list of 37 things that need to be done tomorrow, she won’t tell me it can’t be done.  On the contrary.  She’ll rearrange the list in the most practical way and we might actually get it done.  Maybe.
• She loves to watch the kids and always offers so I can run out and do important things…like get my nails done.  ‘Cause she understands that’s an important thing.
• We sit down to dinner every single night.  I’ve been trying to do this with my own family, but it’s hard and life gets in the way.  But when my mom is in town, we sit down to eat at 7pm every night like clockwork.  It’s a little slice of my childhood that I love.  Oh, and she cooks, that’s a huge perk.
• She’s a master organizer.  She helped me get the disaster that was our guest room organized so we could fit a crib.  What we were able to accomplish was nothing short of a miracle and is all thanks to her crazy, amazing organizing skills.  Our house is an episode of Hoarders as it is, but she can always find a way to make room.  Good thing she’s arriving just in time to help me move Hazeline’s clothes into tupperware tubs.  Lucky her.
• Now that I think about it, she’s good at just about everything.  No matter what crazy project I have planned for her, she can find a way to make it better.  No project is too big or too small.  About an hour after I picked her up from the airport for Greenleigh’s first birthday, she was already painting dinosaur frames and drying them using my hairdryer.  She never questions why I do my crazy projects, she just does them and thinks of a dozen ways to make them easier/better/faster.
• She’s my walking calculator.  Her having a PhD in education/mathematics always comes in handy when I’m trying to figure out what 30% off, plus another 10% off is.  Sadly, these are calculations I cannot do myself.  Well, not accurately.  This quality will be very helpful at Party City tomorrow.  She will no doubt be able to calculate to the penny the amount I spent on each goody bag.  Then she’ll find a way to put together an even cooler goody bag for less (please see the previous bullet point).
• When she leaves, my house will be cleaner than when she arrived.  My mom is always doing laundry, tidying up, and loading the dishwasher.  I tell her to stop, but secretly I love it.   Our cleaning lady will have an easy week this week – She definitely deserves it.

Okay, I know that list looks bad.  It looks like all she does when she visits is work, but she says she likes to – I swear!