It's not Mother's Day today

While I was at the Kinesiology conference in Croatia, another speaker gave a presentation on exercise & childhood obesity. He said the only statistically significant factor to combat obesity in his research was if the Mom was physically active.

The LDS church does tons of research on itself and the members. When I was finishing up at BYU the first time (Winter Semester '99), there was a rumor that the church did a study to find out what was the main influence to get young men to serve missions. The answer: if their Moms had served a mission.

My Mom had a phrase she said to me over and over and over and over and over (you get the point), while I was growing up: "The best kind of Mom is a returned missionary, college educated kind of Mom".

David O. McKay, the 9th prophet of the church, is quoted as saying: "No other success can compensate for failure in the home." [Conference Report April 1935, p.116]

Can you see a pattern here? And people think a Mom's job isn't that important. My Aunt Sally gave me some great advice a while back. She told me to join the PTA and be involved in your kids education. The story she told me is that other parents had been complaining about an English teacher at the high school for a while, but because they weren't on the PTA nothing happened. My genius IQ cousin Brittney ended up getting this teacher and did not get an A+ like she usually did, so my Aunt got this teacher transferred to another school.

When my nephew was a toddler on the verge of learning his ABC's, my Mom found a website that helps kids learn the alphabet and grammar. This made me realize my Mom, Grandma Jensen, and Great-Grandma Amy are the reasons why education is so important in my family. Now research is catching up to the importance of women/Moms, which is the opinion my family always had.

So thank you Mom and all the other women who make me a better person! Hopefully, I can be a better Aunt and future Mom!