Happy Mother's Day To...Myself

Yikes! This month has gotten away from me. The first half of May wasn't too busy, really...I even found time to catch a few quick naps and avoid various responsibilities. But as usual, the latter half of May happened, with all that implies (birthdays, extracurriculars, school, church, holidays, etc.)...and here I am, with summer vacation imminent, and the blog lying fallow and uncultivated whilst I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. Time for some catching up.

Mother's Day is usually a low-key affair at our house; for some reason, I get a little uncomfortable at the thought of being endlessly pampered or showered with gifts or whatever. I feel like my birthday is sufficient for that level of spoiling...I don't need two days a year for all that! (I'm not begrudging any other moms out there who love to be spoiled on Mother's Day...these are just my own feelings.) That, plus the fact that my Sundays are a lot busier than they used to be, mean that Mother's Day has often been a hurried afterthought.

However, as the kids have grown older, they have gotten a lot more excited about Mother's Day than even myself (I suspect their schoolteachers have had something to do with this, and who am I to gainsay them?). This year, both Lorelai and Celeste made gifts for me at school/preschool. They spent the whole week leading up to Mother's Day gleefully hinting at how awesome their presents were. Their enthusiasm for the holiday made me more enthusiastic in turn, and I started to look forward to my day of being pampered.

Luckily for me, Nathan got into the "pampering mood" as well. I got breakfast in bed out of the deal!

After eating, it was time to open my presents.

Lorelai gave me a hand-made wind chime. It was very cute, but since it was made out of clay, I thought it would work better if we hung it up inside the house, for now, to prevent breakage.

Celeste brought me this adorable jar:

It was filled with a small questionnaire about the student's mothers (Celeste got most of the information right, except that she put my age as 46 years old! Ouch!). The jar is intended to sit around for the next year, while everybody periodically writes awesome things about me and put those tidbits of awesome into the jar. It's a great idea...now we'll see if anyone remembers to do it! Either way, it was a sweet idea and I appreciated it.

Celeste also made the "wrapping paper" for her gift, by drawing a picture of herself and me:

She later told me that the reason she'd crossed out her own picture was because "this holiday wasn't about me, it was about Mom." Kind of cute.

Nathan bought me a fancier gift than I probably deserve, but a welcome one:

We had an electric counter-top griddle for a few years, before it finally died a horrible death from overuse. We currently have a counter-top George Foreman grill, which is also slowly dying. So Nathan decided on this neat device, which is a combination of both! It has panels that can be flipped to act as either a griddle or a grill. We promptly christened it "The Grill-dle," and I thus declared Mother's Day 2013 to be a success.

I have to finish by saying how grateful I am for my family, and how nice it is to be loved by them. They make every day a little (or a lot) better.