My Dash: Week 16

It's getting hard to remember which stories that I have already told. :)
I have been thinking this week about the kids' perspective on mom being different than a mom's perspective on how she did or is doing. It is hard to know which of the many moments that we spend together each day are making an impression.  What is their overall understanding from all these tiny daily events going to be?
Looking back, my overarching perspective on my mom as a kid was that she trusted me. She let us be independent in a way that helped us find ourselves.  One early memory is of making mud pies at the E family's house with no bad reactions from mom.  Also gathering "beautiful" shiny black rocks (tarred asphalt of some kind) from the newly repaved roadside, which I washed in the sink - that was at the landau house. I remember her letting us make experiments in the kitchen.  Messy experiments like trying to figure out how to make Reese's Peanut butter cups with chocolate chips and peanut butter.  Now I think of what a big pain it must have been to clean up all those little bowls of melted peanut butter with various mixins.  She let me try out my sewing with her scrap fabrics and later with her quilt fabrics. I wanted to take a quilting class with my friends so she took me to it.  She let us paint our own rooms and pick out our own outfits. My sister S had some very dramatic ones. One in particular I remember, involving a black cape and red swim cap. She let us have friends over all the time and took us to friends houses. We made good friends because she did lots of driving around. I spent several weeks one summer at my cousins house 2 hours away and she drove and picked me up both ways. And when my best childhood friend moved away in middle school she drove 2.5 hours each way to drop me off for many long weekends with them.  She let me get a job before I was able to drive and trusted me to ride my bike there and back. She trusted us to be good examples, like when P said he would not watch an R-rated movie at one of his school friend's houses. And later as teenagers our house was a favorite place to hang out because she trusted us to make good choices and also bought massive amounts of teenager foods like hot pockets, oreos, and ice cream. And she did not micromanage our eating.
I also remember thinking a lot that my mom was proud of me.  I know we always rolled our eyes, but mom was our best cheerleader and "bragged" a lot about this or that great thing that we had done or award that we had won. (Still does :) She wrote us little encouraging notes. She is dramatic and made a big deal about successful report cards, honor rolls, student of the month, and our first everything...
 Love you Mom!