#7 You can brag about your mom for homework and it's not weird.

This was my homework for my Comm 111 class this week. My final project will be a feature story on her homeschooling experience. This week's part was a focus paper-all about the person the final story will be about. Love you, Mom!

  Although she never finished her bachelor’s degree, Staci Taylor, (or Mom, as I like to call her) teaches elementary school. The former early childhood education major and forever mother of five home schools her two youngest children.

            School starts around ten, but her day begins while it is still dark. She gets up early and makes breakfast for Chris (my dad), and my brother Dallin, 16, and John, 14, before they leave for seminary at 6:30.

            Before Jared and Noah, my other brothers, wake up, Mom prepares to face the day. Makeup is applied to the bags beneath the blue eyes none of her children inherited. The brown square glasses go on. She styles her short brown hair, notes her gray roots, and adds hair dye to the shopping list.  The house is generally quiet, and this is when laundry gets done and the housework at least begun.

            More often than not, her cell phone ringing earlier than etiquette allows breaks the silence.  She answers my phone call ready with advice on how to cook blackened salmon or with help on that writing assignment. The special ringtone wakes ten-year-old Jared and he waits impatiently for his turn on the phone. While he’s on the phone, seven-year-old Noah wakes up. When he’s had his turn on the phone, the boys get ready for the day and school begins.

            My mother loves teaching her children. She had always planned to return to school and get her degree when her youngest started kindergarten. She began home schooling in 2007 when Noah should have begun public school. She had taken issue with the way the local public elementary did things and their adverse effects on Jared’s health, education, and happiness.

Her dry chapped hands are never stationary. They point out a mistake in a spelling assignment, high-five after a passed test, make lunch, load the dishwasher, and drive to the high school to pick up the older boys from band practice.

When the younger boys are done with school and the older boys come home, her work doesn’t stop. She’s calling her young women to remind them about an activity or visit-teaching her inactive neighbor. She’s making dinner or driving Dallin and John back to band practice.

            Essentially, my mother is a service-oriented woman. She looks out for the people in her life before herself.