School Crafts (Lincoln Logs)

Mom was really good with crafts. She even had a cottage industry going on for a while where she would make holiday ornaments and other fun little decorations for people and sell at craft fairs.
Sometimes even she would be invited to our classes to help students with Father's Day or Mother's Day cards or artsy gifts, and her projects were always so lovely yet simple and fun. One year she helped my class make cards for Father's Day where the cards looked like a button-down shirt with an origami tie cut into the shirt. Another time she helped us make "mini gingerbread houses" out of graham crackers and frosting.
She was so good at helping me get my crafty projects for class.
When I was in 4th grade, I had a craft project for a book I had read. I had to build a log cabin in the woods, with a blue car holding a flamingo in the trunk. It was trying to depict a scene in the book where I felt the plot turned.
Most of my classmates were collecting twigs and sticks to build the house. But Mom wanted to be crafty with me, so we went to Michael's and bought some medium-thick craft sticks. We cut them up with a little saw and crafted some gaps into end of each little log we had made. We stacked the logs to make the cabin, and used glue and dirt to make a puddy paste of some sort to put between the logs.
I was so proud of how professional my project looked. My teacher, on the other hand, thought I had cheated by using Lincoln Logs for my project. They didn't think it was possible for sometime to make something from scratch that looked so nice, especially at 9 years of age.
I went home crying to Mom, telling her how they thought I had cheated on our work together, and how I didn't understand why they thought we would do such a thing. She stormed into class the next day to have a word with the teacher and explain how we slaved over making a nice log cabin.
I think I did okay after that.

Car Naps

Mom would drive me to all of my extracurricular activities when I was younger, and I did a lot of activities. Often I would be exhausted, and the purring of the car engine would put me to sleep while she drove me to, say, dance classes.
Sometimes when we were early for classes she would just drive around a little longer while I napped, because she would "just feel like a good nap may help". She hated waking me up after those extra few minutes of naps I would get on our drives.

Car Adventures

When we moved to North Andover, MA, we had a hard time getting around the cow paths (aka streets). They turned and twisted, and this was the time before GPS units.
Mom was always notorious for getting us lost on our car rides with her.
We had to find my elementary school before the school year started, and we became hopelessly lost. We kept finding ourselves on the same streets, going in circles for an hour or so.
When we asked Mom why we were so lost, she said, "We aren't lost - we're on an adventure!" She never really seemed to mind too much if we didn't know where we were or how we were going to find our way back.
This was her motto nearly every time we got lost, and we got lost a lot in New England.

Anonymous Cake

Mom used to say, "Real charity is done anonymously".
And Mom was so good at making fun and beautiful cakes.
Dad mentioned at Mom's funeral something I never knew about her when it came to this philosophy.
He mentioned when we were little and living in Buffalo, NY...Mom used to make one of her famously nice cakes every month and bring it down to the local orphanage for the kids there to be able to have a birthday cake once in a while. So the kids with a birthday in that month would be able to celebrate with something.
And she did it secretly, almost - it seems only Dad knew about it. She'd make the cake, and pass it to the orphanage, and leave without much of a thank you, it seems.
That's pretty remarkable, that she did that.