Mother’s Day, In Summary

I hope everyone had a wonderful Mother’s Day yesterday. We didn’t have a Mother’s Day weekend, like last year, in large part because I spent a good portion of the weekend plugging away at household projects again, including painting more of the house.

We did, however, celebrate the day itself with cards, flowers, and exorbitant amounts of food. Trust me when I say that it was all good.

My oldest child had been walking around all last week pestering me with questions about things like my age and my hobbies. (Do mothers with children in preschool and elementary school actually have hobbies? The idea sounds so quaint.) My personal favorite question was, “What do you actually do when I’m at school?”

It all became clear Sunday morning when I opened up a card he had made for me, which was really more of a book including information from the questions he had been asking all week. Almost all of the questions were answered appropriately if succinctly, save the one asking about what I do all day.

“I don’t know,” he wrote.

Hey, he’s nothing if not honest.

My youngest was very sweet about the whole thing, giving me hugs, kisses and Mother’s Day wishes several times throughout the day and marveling over how well her father had managed to do picking out flowers for me without her as chief consultant. “I don’t know when, but he did it all by himself this time,” she explained solemnly.

My middle child wrote me a note so sophisticated I first thought it was from his older brother. He concluded the note with this line, my favorite sentence in the whole note, “You are my favret girl.” This, of course, is coming from the boy who’s decided he doesn’t like girls much, what with their affinities for pink and dolls and their relative disinterest in Lego Ninjago and all. As he explains it, anyway, he doesn’t like them enough to deter him from his recent decision to remain a bachelor for life.

I suppose it appears odd that “You are my favret girl” is my favorite sentence given his relative disinterest in the gender as a whole. But it really isn’t. Because despite what he says about the female population, his actions, including his little furtive looks and hidden smiles, betray him.

Yep, I definitely have some first grade rate competition.