Happy Mother's Day Eve!

This morning I burst out in a sweat, taking care of laundry, ironing a shirt for a Mother's Day banquet, and cooking a package of bacon to put together a brunch box for Pamela to take to said banquet (Van's gf/cf mini-waffles with syrup and vegan butter, lemon soy yogurt, and bacon). Steve, of course, remarked that, if I did not procrastinate so much . . . then again, David and I spent the evening in Sumter and did not arrive home until 11:45 last night! That's my excuse, and I'm not backing down!

Pamela, my mother and I dressed up somewhat for the banquet. My mother is awesome and it seems like God gave us completely different attributes: I sing and learned to play the piano and recorder; she does not sing and learned to play the harmonica, violin, and accordion. She is an awesome cook and gardener, and I have a black thumb in both venues. She loves to sew and makes the most gorgeous quilts, but sewing makes me cry in frustration. We both knit and crochet, feed the birds, read living books and love the smell of laundry hung outdoors, and we both love the Lord. Her mother was such an awesome woman, that we got her story published in the anthology, My Mom Is My Hero in a chapter called "My Mietze." (In case you don't believe me, my mother spent her childhood escaping bombs in eastern Germany, Russians advancing toward their border, and deathly conditions in a Danish refugee camp during World War II.)



The women of my church put together a wonderful program with the theme of mothers being a light for their children. They decorated all of the tables with oil lamps! The foods was delicious, the music inspiring, and the message a reminder of how much God has taught me since becoming a mother through this journey with autism: the importance of relationships both vertical (with God) and horizontal (with people) which form the shape of a cross, the need to stay in the word and in prayer, referencing God when I feel uncertain, and the joy of friendship with fellow believers (and are surprising hard to find at times).



When we arrived home, Steve surprised me with some lovely presents! If you haven't figured it out already, I avidly watch birds. The latest caper that cracked me up was the brown thrasher taking a bath. After watching it madly splash away, I figured out why they are called thrashers! Later I snapped a shot of a fat mourning dove and an elusive blue jay who is much shyer than I expected and skittish around cameras.






And, what thoughtful gift did Steve buy for Mother's Day?

Well, it wasn't flowers!

It was not chocolate (which is always appreciated) either!

He bought a gorgeous seed tube and a bluebird box! And, yes, I am Snoopy dancing!


My favorite portrait of motherhood is by someone who was never a mother herself: Charlotte Mason.

It is not for nothing that the old painters, however diverse their ideas in other matters, all fixed upon one quality as proper to the pattern Mother. The Madonna, no matter out of whose canvas she looks at you, is always serene. This is a great truth, and we should do well to hang our walls with the Madonnas of all the early Masters if the lesson, taught through the eye, would reach with calming influence to the heart. Is this a hard saying for mothers in these anxious and troubled days? It may be hard, but it is not unsympathetic. If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children when these are overdone, we should have happier households. Let the mother go out to play! If she would only have courage to let everything go when life becomes too tense, and just take a day, or half a day, out in the fields, or with a favourite book, or in a picture gallery looking long and well at just two or three pictures, or in bed, without the children, life would go on far more happily for both children and parents. The mother would be able to hold herself in 'wise passiveness,' and would not fret her children by continual interference, even of hand or eye––she would let them be. (Volume 3, page 34)

NOW, GO OUT AND PLAY!