"Mother of the Year" Award

As I may have mentioned before, and for those of you who don't know me, I'm a rules follower. I am always on a quest to find the set of "rules" I need to follow in order to be the best I can be in any given situation (I know, I have problems!). This has been a big challenge for me in my faith because I'm constantly trying to reduce the Bible to a set of rules, and it just doesn't work that way! In fact, most of life doesn't work that way! But for some reason I'm hard-wired to think that way, so it's an on-going challenge for me.
Today I was looking up a book on learning styles on Amazon.com, and the write-up about the author said she was the 2007 Mother of the Year award recipient for her state. That caught my eye - the Mother of the Year?! You have got to be kidding me! As if I don't have enough issues with feeling adequate as a mother and a wife, now you're telling me there's a set of criteria people use to decide what mom is the Mother of the Year?!!! Ahhh. I don't need that kind of pressure! I did research it a little to see what exactly they were referring to -- apparently, an organization known as American Mothers, Inc., puts on the official competition each year, and there are fairly stringent requirements. For those of you out there who have known about this before, please don't read me wrong here - I'm not knocking the women who have won. I'm sure they are well-deserving - probably the types of women I would like to be mentored by. But that's not the point - the point is that rule-followers like myself do not need to be considering what exactly would qualify a woman for Mother of the Year. Because then I'll decide those are the things I need to be focused on. Sheesh. For the record, I'm not bookmarking the site!