Daughters

One of my favorite Christmas gifts was this coupon from Amy: "The bearer of this coupon is entitled to one (1) free breakfast at Serena’s Diner in Harrisburg, OR, with Amy Smucker, who will foot the bill. The recipient may choose the day and time. : ) "

I love to go out for breakfast, and I felt like I had "arrived" as a mom to get such a coupon from my nearly-grown-up daughter. I look forward to redeeming it when she comes home from Bible school.

I have three daughters who are all very different from each other. Somehow in my early fantasies I had pictured us all sharing the same tastes, talking about the same things, and pretty much being alike.

What I am finding is that I share very specific things with each daughter.

Jenny shows signs of being crafty. She and I enjoy paper crafts and knitting with the Knifty Knitter looms I got her for Christmas. She is also my huggiest daughter and fills up my Warm Fuzzies tank. We enjoy talking with each other and she thinks I give good advice.

Emily makes me laugh, with her crazy sense of humor. She and I get the same thrill out of a pretty tray with elegant teacups and a pot of black tea. We both enjoy opening the tin of Kenyan tea bags and just inhaling the fragrance, and we also share a sense of drama. We have a bond that comes from surviving her many sicknesses together and from standing together in frozen-food aisles carefully checking ice cream labels for gum carrageenan.

Amy is my lifesaver with her eminent good sense. I rely on her to get my head together when I’m losing it and to help me pull an outfit together and to give me advice with difficult people. She has an amazing intuition for what I need at the moment and how she can meet that need. We both like to eat nutritious food, and she’s the only one of my children who will share an onion-mushroom-green-pepper-garlic-broccoli stir fry with me. Amy and I love fancy coffees and photography and good books.

I hope my girls know that I love and cherish them all three like crazy and I hope they don’t feel less loved if I laugh more with one and discuss more with another and knit more with the third.

Quote of the Day:
"It would have been awfully romantic if he’d have been younger."
--Emily, after she was skiing at Willamette Pass and was flying straight down the mountain because she didn’t know how to steer or stop, and ahead of her was a snowboarder and an instructor talking, and she SCREEEEEAMED that she was going to hit them, and the snowboarder scrambled out of the way, and the ski guy stayed where he was and braced himself and caught her around the waist as she flew by and stopped her. (And, Emily reminds me, they both fell down!)