Mama's Day

Yesterday was Natalia's first Mother's Day with both Celia and Andres. It was a great day! While Natalia was off dancing at Zumba, Andres, Celia and I finished up her mother's day presents--a photo book and cards from them, and a promise-to-go-buy-something-she-wants from me (I've learned that sometimes this is a better option than an actual gift-wrapped present). Celia is still too small to do anything but eat crayons and markers, so I designed her card and then wrote what I imagined she would say. Creative--I know. Uncharted territory.

Andres actually helped to design his own card. I cut out some construction paper flower petals for him, and he arranged them in a flower-like fashion on the card and then helped to tape them down. He loves tape although he has yet to master the fine art of applying it sans-lumps. I then asked him what he loved about his mama, and I got the following responses (no joke):

Me: "Andres, what do you love about mama?"

Andres: "32 pounds!"

Me: "What? That's crazy. Tell me what you love about mama!"

Andres: "I'm a princess."

Me: "You're a princess? Can you tell me what you love about mama?"

Andres: "Rice."

I'm finding that sometimes I can have real, honest conversations with my son. And then there are times where I just have to throw in the towel early. This was one of those times.

I did eventually learn that he likes it when Natalia tells him he can watch Curious George on TV, and also that he likes climbing into bed with us when he gets scared at night. So those made it onto the card, along with the rice comment...I left the others out though.

I was pretty proud of the photo book. I ordered it through blurb, after I had designed the entire thing in Aperture, only to learn that Aperture no longer supports the ordering of real photo books with the version I was using. So that was a wasted 2 hours. But I found the quality of the blurb book to be quite good and the book-maker interface to be pretty easy to use, so I may use that service again...perhaps to create a memento of my 10 week parental vacation that I can flip through on particularly aggravating days at work (I'm sure there will be some).

We all headed out to Natalia's frisbee game in the afternoon and cheered her on in between massive wind gusts. Our attendance clearly helped as her team won the game! She requested a post-game dinner of loaded nachos and paninis...I was happy that I did not burn the nachos, and in fact made an order that could rival Applebee's. And due to the past couple weeks of practice I can make paninis in my sleep now.

A great day for a great mama. I'm not sure how she is able to get up at all hours of the night to feed Celia, and then get up to go to school in the morning, without relying on caffeine...I know I could never do that (or even want to do that!). I hope that she got to relax for at least one day. I'm already looking ahead to Father's Day which, happily, coincides with the World Cup. Guess what I'll be doing that day?