My mom is notoriously wimpy when it comes to medication. (And why wouldn’t she be? The woman is five foot nothing, one hundred and nothing pounds. A Flintstones vitamin would provide her with a week’s worth of dietary supplements.) We make a lot of jokes about Mom’s inability to handle adult doses of medicine. The running joke among my siblings is that a dose of Children’s Tylenol can wipe her out for a couple days. (I’m exaggerating, of course. It’s probably more like a half a dose.)

When my sister Mia got pregnant with her first child, my mom went nuts with excitement. It was her first grandchild and she drove my sister crazy with pregnancy advice. Normally you’d think that comes pretty standard from a grandmother-to-be, but my Korean and somewhat superstitious mother had some rather unconventional tips for my pregnant sister. Below are a few of the highlights:

Of my siblings, my brother John is the only one who remains in Michigan. As such, he gets to experience the bulk of Mom’s, well, Mom-ness. He told me that whenever there’s extreme weather of any sort (when it’s either really hot or really cold), he always has the exact same conversation with Mom over the phone.

One of my favorite sites on the web is reddit, a community of users who share links to stories, pictures, and videos. The community often asks each other questions in order to get to know one another. Recently a redditor posted the question, “Were you an ‘oops’ or were you planned?” I responded with, “My mom ‘won’ me in a card game.” Sure enough, someone followed up with, “There’s got to be a more extensive story behind this. Let’s hear it.” Well, here it is.

I recently turned 27 years old and got a giant card in the mail from my mom — it seems the older she gets, the larger the cards get. By the time she’s 70 I’ll get well wishes sky written across Seattle (if she knew how to book something like that). She called and left a happy birthday message, and I called her back for the standard somewhat-awkward-slash-amusing phone conversation.