Mother's Day

Mother's Day is here again, and I haven't received a single card, flower, present -- nothing. But, you know, it's OK. I told Rocket Boy we could celebrate Mother's Day late and Father's Day early when he gets here -- in 12 days! -- so I didn't expect anything from him. The twins I guess could have made me a card, but they aren't very artistic or crafty. It would have been a stretch. They could have made me breakfast in bed, but I had a bad night and ended up sleeping until 10 (!), at which point the cats woke me up by walking on me and even licking my eyelid (Chester).

When I finally got up, fed the cats, and went out to get the paper, I stayed out for a minute or two, listening to the birds in the trees. It was such a cool, pleasant morning, so much sunshine, bees all over our dandelions. A neighbor rode by on his bike and called out, "Happy Mother's Day!" and I thought that was so nice. "Thank you," I called back. I don't know his name, but I think he's the person who offered to help me shovel snow a few months ago.

When I went back in the house I was still smiling. I told the twins about it, and Kid A said, "I didn't even know it was Mother's Day," which I call Not Paying Attention, since I know he's seen ads for Mother's Day this past week and I've certainly mentioned it. Also, on Friday, Kid B had a video call with his language arts teacher for the express purpose of making a Mother's Day gift, which Kid A listened in on. Unfortunately, the teacher went quickly through the directions, and didn't post them, and Kid B got stuck on #1 -- find a container. He kept calling to me, "Where's a container I could use?" and I said, "What kind of a container?" and he said he didn't know. I told him to look in the cupboard under the counter, but he didn't. Finally I opened that cupboard and pulled out a container with a lid. "Would this work?" "Yeah, but now I don't know what to do, because she went too fast and now everyone's done already."

I told him it was fine. I don't even know what the Mother's Day gift was, except that it was supposed to contain sugar, oil, lemon juice, and some other things. I'm sure I would have liked it, but I don't mind not receiving it. I thought it was very sweet of the teacher to have done the project.

Last night I had two special treats. No, I take that back, there were three. First was our usual Saturday night delivery dinner, from Noodles, and unlike last week from Snarf's, the order was perfect -- they sent everything we ordered and it tasted good. A few minutes after we started eating, the phone rang, and it was my niece Lauren reminding me about the Zoom piano recital I had been invited to, which of course I'd totally forgotten about. I hurried back to the office, turned on my new-ish computer, forwarded the invitation email from my phone to the email that I can get on that computer, clicked on the link, and was drawn in to treat #2, this lovely recital. My nephew's three kids take piano lessons from a really good teacher in Los Angeles, and they practice on my father's old piano, a 100+-year-old Mason & Hamlin baby grand. For the recital, each kid played at their own home. A Zoom recital seems very weird, of course, but it was also so cool, because of all the people who were able to watch. So on one screen I could see whichever grandnephew/niece was playing at the time or waiting to play next, on another screen there was the rest of the family (my nephew, his wife, and the other two kids), on another screen there was my name (I turned the video off so I could keep eating my dinner), on another screen there was my little sister's name, on another screen there was my older sister and her husband, and on another screen was my nephew's dad. And of course there were all the other people in the recital and their families on their screens. The music was lovely and the little pianists all did exceptionally well, especially compared to piano recitals I recall from my youth.

Treat #3 was a little different. Last week was Teacher Appreciation Week and I had meant to send all the kids' teachers e-cards, but I never got around to it. School was hard this week. I kept my temper, which is good, but I also realized that I'm just burning out on this stuff -- as are they, of course! On Friday they each were supposed to finish a major poem and submit it, and we didn't get it done. And I don't care. I feel like school is almost over and we've done a lot of work and I don't care if we happen not to do any more. Which is a bad attitude. But anyway, I did want to take the time to let the teachers know that I/we appreciate them, so on Saturday night I got to work and chose e-cards for all of them (one about how apples and honey are produced for the science teacher, one with a typewriter providing percussion for a song for the band teacher, etc.), wrote nice notes to each, trying to think of specific things I liked about them, and sent them off. And that made me feel good, because of course doing nice things for people always makes you feel good.

So, Mother's Day. In addition to sleeping late, I played 25 Microsoft Solitaire games (had to finish up the daily challenges for April and get started on May) without feeling guilty, and then I made cookies. I kept thinking about that lemony present Kid B was going to make me, and that made me want something lemony. So I made Lemon Dot Lacies, a recipe I got from my mother's cousin Dorothy about 25 years ago. When I went looking for the recipe online I found something called Lemon Oat Lacies which is the same recipe as mine, so I think "Dot" must be a transcription error for "Oat." Maybe I should call them Lemon Oat Dot Lacies in future. Anyway, they're very tasty and half the recipe made 45 tiny cookies -- and less than half are left, so you can see how we liked them.

Rocket Boy is going to call in 30 minutes and walk Kid A through the steps of making pancakes, so that will be my Mother's Day dinner. I'm looking forward to it! Tomorrow we have school again and I will try to pull myself together and pull the kids through the week. I also need to work on housecleaning, because things have really gotten out of hand and I don't want RB to be horrified when he walks in the door. So that'll be a project.

Otherwise we're just cruising along, feeling sad about the endless terrible news, wondering how to make life better for other people when we're still hanging out at home. Colorado is opening up, but I don't think we're going to participate in that too much. Until I know I have antibodies, I'm going to be too nervous to have my hair cut.