Do it with a smile

Hardly anyone can remember Mom with out remembering how upbeat she was through out her chemo. Breast cancer is a hard thing to take on and she did it with a smile. It was far from easy. The process is all that is life altering and not in a good way, but she did it well.

Here's a few pictures of that time.

Here's a before picture of mom when she got her head shaved

Here's an after picture. I love this picture because my dad looks oriental.

Here's mom at one of her chemo infusions. Yes she is making a baby blanket for some one else.

Always smiling.

One thing that stands out when I remember Mom is how organized she was. She had lists and charts all over the place. She even had her own collection of books on the subject of organization she was always looking at how to be better organized. Well there is one aspect of her organizational skills that really stands out in my mind, how she organized our toys. I remember when we were little and living in West Valley we had an unfinished basement. So Dad finished the basement and we received another bedroom and a play room where we could put all of our toys and have a place to play with them without being in the way or making too big of a mess. But what to do with the toys? She couldn’t just have us stuff all our toys in a closet down there (there wasn’t one). So she had my dad make these cubbies where we would organize our toys. That’s right, we organized our toys. I can still remember the labels on some of them. I remember one was misc. that was where we put toys we got from McDonalds or what ever. One that was Fisher Price. One that was dolls where our “jumpy dolls” went. It looked beautiful when mom was done. The only problem was, we were kids and we wanted to play with our toys. She would come down stairs and see the mess and tell us to clean it up and I would scream “No Mom! I just organized my toys so I can play with them.” I had these elaborate setups that I had to finish before I could play with it. She, feeling sympathy for having something you had just organized ruined, would let me keep my toys out. Well my excuse started to wear out and one day she came down and was furious. There wasn’t a bit of carpet to be seen because our toys were literally all strewn out on the floor, even her bins she used to organize our toys were upturned and on the floor. Realizing that our organized mess was really just a mess she had all three of us go down stairs to clean up. We pushed the toys to the middle of the room and made a huge pile. Then she took the toy bins and laid them out in a row. What we did next is still to this day one of my favorite memories. She would take a toy from the pile hand it to us and we had to then run around the pile to the bins and put the toy in the correct bin. Then we would continue to run around the pile back to her to get another toy and do the same thing. It was so fun! It was like a race. The whole time we were laughing and trying to go faster than each other and pretty soon the job was done. I think mom was even surprised at how well it turned out. She was always trying to make things fun for us and let us do our own thing. I hope someday I can do the same thing for my kids.