Family/Friend Friday --- ALMOST the Perfect Mom

REMINDER --- Today we leave for Gettysburg for vacation for a week...there will be no Blogs next week. Come back on July 14th!

Growing up, I had a great mother! She was always there for me and my brother and sister for everything. She always took care of us when we were sick, got out of bed to get us a drink of water, never missed any of our sporting events, concerts, etc (even to this day she shows up at every single magic show I do within an hour of DuBois!), planned special vacations for us, and the list could go on and on. However, there was one area that prevented her from being the "perfect" mom --- COOKING

It is strange that she lacks in this area (she would agree with this as well) because her mom and grandma are the best cooks! Thankfully my grandma (her mom) lived right across the street growing up, so I knew I could always venture over to her house for a good meal. It wasn't as if she didn't try --- things would just never turn out right. And things as easy as heating up a meal could into disaster. Just last Thanksgiving my mom was attempting to heat up the dinner my grandma prepared and accidentally left the oven mitt in the oven filling the house with smoke and setting all the alarms off.

My dad could tell you stories about her culinary "attempts" all day long. For me, one story sticks out more than the rest. It was back when I was in college and home for Christmas. I walked into the house and my mom was in the kitchen making something to take to my aunt's house for Christmas Eve. She looked very proud of her creation --- peanut butter fudge. She asked me to try some, and I should have learned my lesson not to, but it did look and smell really good.

So I took a bite, and it was actually really good! I gave her some compliments, and took another bite. However, this time I tasted something unique...kind of like paper. Out of my mouth I pulled some wax paper. She assured me that I wouldn't find any more, but in the next bite...more wax paper. As we looked through all the fudge, we found more wax paper! What was going on?

Turns out the recipe called for a stick of butter. My mom used one of those sticks of butter that come in the clear wax paper rather than the shiny silver paper:

So when she was cooking and had to melt the butter, she threw in the entire stick...wrapper and all. But...at least after all those years, she still tried! After all, we can't be perfect at everything.