"All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."

Today, on her 60th birthday, we give tribute to the BEST mom ever! She is the reason that we are planners, organized, frugal, positive, energetic, involved moms, hard working, successful and basically who we are as adults. When you had a childhood like ours, raised by a mom like ours, it is hard not to be constantly in awe of how lucky you are. So, without further ado, to our mom, the woman who:

made sure we had the best celebrations for every holiday and made us realize that hair brushing is overrated, 

posed with a snake for some reason (I am guessing it is because she had a son and he liked it-she always did everything for us),

planned the best birthday parties every

year of our lives (It was just recently that I realized how exhausting it must have been to have 20 or 30 people at our house being entertained, fed and acting like we owned the place....all of the time),

always serving as the hub of family activities/cookouts/parties/celebrations,

let us do fun things on vacations like go parasailing/falling off the parachute thing,

organized events for us to volunteer at/bring the elephant turd tradition to, 

planned celebrations for anyone and everyone (I have no idea who George is or where he was going, but I am sure that my mom organized that party),

was the room mother every year and managed to get Burger King to donate kid's meals for our end of year party in 3rd grade,

was our Brownie/ girl scout troop leader (Nicole is really becoming Mom),

was our middle school cheer "sponsor" and organized our uniforms, camps, games and even made signs for the games, 

let us host Spirit Week prep parties at our house every year, helped us get boxes and costumes and all kinds of things donated, showed up to every event that we ever had at school, 

planned/attended/organized every class party we ever had, (I can't tell if that is one of us with the mullet in the front or not),

let us do fun things like order from room service, 

made every holiday magical (because of traditions and family, not because of gifts, but those didn't hurt), 

sat at a million different soccer/softball/track meets (HOW AWFUL ARE TRACK MEETS??),

took us on trips to Notre Dame and clearly provided entertainment as well, 

never let us realize that she had hard times and difficult situations in her own life; all we knew was that we were having the damn time of our lives, 

took us to every breakfast with Santa, Easter Egg hunt, Halloween Haunted Houses and all other kinds of activities (this is the most dominant gene that we inherited from her),

celebrates everyone amazingly, 

sat on Santa's lap to make her kids happy, 

set high expectations for us and helped us to reach them, 

let us do...this... to our rooms, 

clearly raised us to have no shortage of self confidence (what on earth? maybe we need some small filter)-this is the result of a mom who believes in you all of the time and raises you to be yourself and not worry about others), 

and make us grateful for her everyday! 

Mom-we love you for all of your positive energy, ability to see the best in everyone, honesty, unselfishness, ability to tackle every problem head on, the perseverance to see those solutions through, and for raising us with high expectations supported by unconditional love and really fun birthday parties. 

We love you!

**Also, this was supposed to be just pics of her, but moms just don't make the picture cut as often as the kids, but she was always there.