Today is my mom's birthday.

Okay, today is my mom's birthday, and this post is about her. It can be a little awkward reading a post where the person praises their mom, because everyone thinks their own mother is the greatest, so it's weird hearing someone else proclaim that. But you know, I don't care because my mom really IS the greatest mom, so I'm going to shout it out. Okay, just kidding, I know I won't change your mind, but there truly are some really REALLY cool things about my mom that I'm sure most everyone would find interesting, and this post is for my own benefit--so I'll just write whatever thought comes to my head. Without further ado.

My mom's name is Lorie Fay.

She is the youngest of nine kids and she grew up on the most GORGEOUS spot of land on the earth--in Southern Alberta, about fifteen kilometers away from Waterton National Park (Canadian side of Glacier National Park) on a ranch.

Now, some true (though seemingly unbelievable) facts about her childhood: She and her two parents and eight brothers and sisters lived in a house with only two tiny bedrooms, a tiny front room, and a small kitchen. It has since been enlarged, but even as it stands now it probably has less than 1000 sq. feet. (And I feel very cramped living with 3 kids in our 900-something sq. ft. house!). I know that she had told us before how the arrangements were, but I had forgotten, so I asked her recently. She said that in the one bedroom there were two full sized beds, one that three brothers slept in, and one that three sisters slept in. Another sister slept in a pull-out cot that they pulled out into the kitchen every night. Her and her brother Delroy slept in some kind of small bunk bed in their mom and dad's small room. She said, "You know, in those days, we all just went to bed. At the same time." Oh, and in the summers, her brothers slept in a tent in the front yard. She remembers once, after her oldest sister, Jeannnette had gone to Ricks for nursing school, a guy from the States came 'calling' on her and slept out in the tent with the brothers. My mom said, "He must have thought we were so back-woodsy!" Indeed!

Also, my mom never had an indoor toilet until after she got married. This is in freezing Canada, for Pete's sake! Whenever I count my blessings, I always am thankful for an indoor toilet. She even remembers using paper and magazine pages for wiping. My mom is tough. Much tougher than a regular person.

My mom says that sometimes she feels more akin to people that are a generation older than her, because her growing up was the same as theirs.

My mom and dad grew up in towns close to each other, and my dad and my Uncle Delroy played on the highschool football team. Once upon a time at a Stake dance, my mom saw my dad and since she hadn't heard the outcome of the last game, she asked him who won. My dad saw my mom, thought "Wow" (okay, for the record, I don't really know if that's exactly what he thought, but I'm sure it was something akin to that), and took his date home so that he could come back and pick up my mom and take her home.

Since my mom was still at the junior high, and my dad was at the high school, he would pick her up at lunch time and they would drive around. My mom said none of the high school girls liked her at all---in fact, were pretty snooty because, of course, they were jealous that this little impostor was dating the senior class president, football star, basketball star, wrestling star, rodeo star (did I miss anything? ;) ). And mom was mad when this one guy--a good dancer--wouldn't dance with her because he was afraid Dad would beat him up.

One of the coolest things ever to me, is that after they got married, my mom rode the rodeo circuit (I thought that my mom and dad did together, but she corrected me that Dad only did it in high school). She barrel-raced on my Uncle Montey's horse named Badger while he was at Ricks. I asked her if she ever won any money, and she said remembers winning in Taber and Writing-on-Stone. She said that they stuck out in her mind, because the money she won was more than the entry fee and gas money. :) Other times, my dad and mom did other stuff, like the Rescue Race, where the girl is standing at one side of the arena, and the guy on the horse comes racing towards her, and as he turns around her, he swings her up on the saddle behind him. I TOTALLY wish I could watch them do that. Mom said she thinks Brett and I would be good at that because he has good upper body strength and I'm light. Wish I could try--wouldn't that be awesome! (And as a random sidenote, Brett can do that super-awesome swinging-jump into the saddle, you know--sans stirrups, and it looks soooooo awesome! One of the reasons I had to marry him.) (Another sidenote, why did my parents have to move to the States before I could become a champion barrel-racer--I know that was my true life's calling!)

Anyway, my mom is good at a gazillion things. Let me start listing.

She's an incredibly skilled and intelligent softball player (she said this came from playing with her brothers and sisters everyday after chores were done. They would play 500, and she'd always beg her older brothers and sisters to let the ball drop so she could catch it on the roll, but she said only her nice brother Perry would ever let her. She also described a game called Auntie-I-Over (sp?) that involved throwing a ball over a roof, which she said taught you to never drop your fly balls).

She has an AMAZING voice that I LOVE soo much, and plays the piano really well, and leads ward choirs awesomely (I LOVE being her pianist, she is so enthusiastic and she likes going fast, like me).

She is a fantastic cook and everything she makes tastes great. She has always baked bread for our family, and she makes these INCREDIBLE chocolates and other candy at Christmas time.

She is SO CLEAN. I mean, her house is ALWAYS spic and span--even when she had nine kids at home ranging in ages from 16-1. My dad says sometimes when he's taking her somewhere, he wishes he could blindfold her until they're out of the house, because she'll see a speck of something on the stovetop, and have to scrub it off, then that turns into washing the wall behind the stove, then that turns into the wall adjacent to the stove, and pretty soon she's washing the ceiling three rooms down, and when you ask her what she's doing she says, "Just wiping this spot off the stove." This is perhaps why I can never be at peace with my house. My sister Amy and I have sadly wondered how we came from her. At least I know HOW to clean really well. Anyway, further discussion on this topic will deteriorate into a very long ramble, so I will stop now.

She knows how to drive a tractor, pull a horse trailer, etc.

She is competent in many areas of home repair/building.

She is very smart in general, and also smart at SO many things! For example, she can intelligently talk with my dad about cars, horses, dairying, farming, education, and other things.

She can cut hair and she is very fashionable (though I learned from her to dress in work clothes if you want to get work done that day). I don't know how she got this--I think it is just innate, because I'm sure she has never in her life wasted time reading a fashion magazine. One time some college girls that lived in Minot were talking to her and they said that she had perfect eyebrows. It's true. How does she know how to pluck her eyebrows to perfection? She also does a wonderful job of applying makeup. And, she is gorgeous.

My sister Kami told me that she thinks mom has a never-fail sense of style. For example, Kami will always ask her opinion on a flower arrangement she does or something, because Mom will always pick out whether something is out of balance, it needs something, etc.

One year at girls camp, she was the only one who could light the fires (and Kami helped her).

My mom is smart at all things housekeeping. Gardening, food storage, cleaning, preserving, laundering, etc. Just the other day Brett and I were chopping up a ham that we got on sale, and because our last ham had got freezer burned before we got through it, he said, "Let's call your mom to see what she advises." And lo and behold, she knew just what to do. I always wonder what in the world someone does when she doesn't have a mother who knows everything. I call her to ask something about a recipe, and she asks "Now, does your recipe card say one egg or two?" And I reply one, and she says, "Well, change it to two, that works better." And this is all without going and picking up her recipe card--it's all in her head. It's really amazing.

She sews well. She doesn't often do it too much 'for fun', but she has made beautiful dresses for her girls before, made many quilts for her kids and grandkids, made all the girls dolls, some Halloween costumes, etc. And she's really good at mending holes in jeans. :)

She has really beautiful handwriting. Whenever I or several of my siblings name one of our kids, we always ask her to write it out for us so we can see how lovely it looks. (That gene missed me too, unfortunately.)

She is a friend to EVERYONE! Her neighbors become fast friends. People she meets at church, people she meets at her kids' schools, people on the street, tell her their life stories (she tells them hers too, we always have to pull her out of places). She always offers to help old ladies and old men in grocery stores. Etc. etc.

She's just really good at all the mom stuff. Like when she makes a sandwich, the slices are cut the perfect width, and there's the precisely perfect amount of peanut butter and honey. When she packs a tin-foil dinner, it's not only neat and tidily wrapped, but utterly leak-proof. She can pack things in a box tighter and better than anyone on earth.

She is really really strong. Kami and I decided that she is super-human. She had ten babies and is still slender and trim. She usually beats all the girls at arm-wrestling competitions (though it can be a close call with Megan), and if there was an endurance race I'm sure she'd win that as well. After Brett and I got married we drove to NoDak for the reception there, and his parents flew up as well. We were all chillin outside and for some reason Wyatt started a competition to see who could climb up the rope swing the fastest. My mom totally climbed it so fast. It's funny because it made a big impression on my mother-in-law. She has mentioned it a couple times, saying how impressive it was. And it is. I tried it-and it was hard!

Okay, I'm getting tired, and starting to feel wussy. On to different things. So, my mom's two soapboxes in life: Hard work and Obedience. If you do those two things, you've got it made. She's a very good example of both. See, look at her milking the cow at two years old. Hard worker. As for me, I may have sprung from a different mold, but I cleverly married someone just like her in that department, so I've got it made, right?

Kami and I were talking the other day and decided she's the non-mopiest person we know. She had some quite tough years there when they were young marrieds, had lots of little kids, and dad was deciding whether to be a farmer or a teacher or a dairyman or go back to school, but I just can't imagine her ever just lying on the couch, crying and saying, Wo is me, I have such a hard life. I just know that she just got up and did the work that needed done (not that I believe she was continuously chipper, but still). She's just not one to moan about stuff. When I asked Brett what he thought one of my mom's greatest qualities was, he said her positive attitude.

She always puts her greatest effort into everything she does. Everything. She doesn't even know how to do something passably. One example, in trying to think of something that I'm better at than her, I thought of writing in school. As in, if you don't exactly know the answer, but you can fudge your way through a great-appearing essay anyway--well, I'm really good at that, but my mom--she has to KNOW it. Inside and out. She prefers numbers because, you do the calculations, the numbers come out right. Exact. She always does her jobs with high energy and high speed too. Only not too speedy, because it has to be good. But yeah, high energy. Really though, I think the reason she is so slim is because she is constantly on the go...she really can't watch movies, it strains her far too much to sit still for that long. ;)

She's very practical.

With all this talk about practicality and hard work, you should know that she is SOOO MUCH FUN! In high school, often when Kami's and my group of friends would try to decide whose house to go to, one guy would always say, "Let's go to the Rasmussen's so I can beat their mom at ping-pong!" (My mom is a very excellent ping-pong player.) She likes having get togethers and playing and laughing. She has this wonderful laugh that you can easily pick out in a crowd. Here's a picture of her beating up/tickling Wyatt. She once punched one of my guy friends in high school in the nose on accident when she was pretending to fight him. He turned the wrong way, and she nailed him. It was pretty darn hilarious.

She has a nose like a blood-hound. Once, Wyatt and I built some little fires outside and when we were finished playing around, we ran around flapping our arms and shaking our shirts for a LONG time to get the smell off of us. Well, it so happened that later that day she was tickling us, and then suddenly she was stopped, and sniffed my hair, and sniffed again, and said, "You've been playing with fire!" I couldn't believe it. That reminds me of another time, when she was gone somewhere one evening, I got into the icecream and had some in a cup that I was walking around with, and a teeny tiny itsy bitty little drop fell onto the carpet. Since it was a teeny tiny itsy bitty little drop, I just rubbed it in with my sock--the carpet being very brown-specklish and very good at hiding things. When mom got home she was talking for a minute and then IMMEDIATELY zoomed in to the spot on the carpet and said, "What's this? Who was in the icecream?!" Actually, I don't remember if she knew it was icecream, but either way, I was in trouble. How does she do it?!

So, I suppose I should let you know that she's not absolutely perfect. She does have a very few human frailties. One is a colorful vocabulary. Once upon a time, she was taking me and Kami and probably Wyatt to something, and was in a hurry, and backed out of the driveway into somebody's car that was parked there. She exclaimed, "Hells bells!" Kami and I tried to stifle our laughter at her highly amusing choice of words. One other time I remember her swearing (though it wasn't hells bells that time) was when we were on a long trip home from California, and Kami and I were fighting in our seat, and we were pushing and shoving and being completely obnoxious, and Kami pushed against me really hard (in revenge of something I had done to her) but her feet, which she was using as her leverage, were against the big back window of the van, and suddenly the window just popped out. When I realized what had happened, I thought, "Oh no, Kami's going to die." It was a frightful thing. When Mom realized what had happened, she was very mad (understandably so). (However, we backed up, and the window had fallen on sand and AMAZINGLY had not broken. But it was a cold ride back home to Utah in Dec. with only a quilt stretched across the window.)

Once upon a time when I was a young'un I got in trouble at Youth Conference, and the YW leader was very angry with me and said a lot of mean things (like that I thought I was better than everyone else...blah blah), and so I was stubborn and didn't apologize (for a crime that was VERY minimal, I assure you) and so I got sent home. Well, my dad came and picked me up, and I had to explain to them, and they said that it doesn't matter the situation, you should just obey the leader, but they didn't get too mad, and sent me to bed. Then (don't read this next part mom and dad!) I got out of bed and listened at their door, and mom was REALLY mad at the YW leader! She was saying how she should have handled it so differently and that she should not have said the things she did, etc. And I felt SOOO good!! My mom was defending me and it was sooo very very heartwarming! I think that that may not have been exactly the true significance of what she was saying, but that's how it felt. So good.

Another time, at YW camp, I got in trouble for going out past curfew and going swimming (sheesh--what a wayward kid!). My mom was there as cook that year. The leaders came and had a talk with me the following mid-morning. They said that they wouldn't tell my mom about it as long as I didn't get into any more trouble. I said, "My mom already knows about it." They said, "She does?! Who told her?" and I said, "I did." Ha ha--so much for their big threat.

It's so easy to tell that my mom just loves her kids. From little things, like how whenever she sees a baby on a movie or t.v. she says, 'Why didn't they use one of MY babies? My babies were sooo much cuter than that one." It's so funny, and she's completely sincere. And she always wants to make sure we have all the things we need. Like last Christmas, she called me and Kami and found out which size pans we had and bought us some Lifetime pans (which have an 'L' on them, which I always thought stood for 'Lorie' growing up). She always helps us with whatever we ask her to, she talks to us, and hugs us and takes care of us and thinks of us all the time. It is sad that I can't live a little closer, because she is a fantastic grandma too, and my kids LOVE playing with her!!

In closing, I'd just like to say that I'm incredibly blessed and grateful that I got to have her as my mother.