Sweetly singing all the day

Happy Mothers' Day, to you and you and you! (yes, I'm putting the apostrophe there on purpose. Deal with it!)

My mothers' day has been low key but heartfelt: Baby J and the husband brought me breakfast and a homemade card in bed (Raisin Bran, Baby J's new favorite, so he could share). Then we all got up and readied ourselves for church. The husband even dressed J and packed the diaper bag without a reminder and everything!

At church we heard the requisite odes to mothers, witnessed the always endearing musical number by the children, and got the requisite rose delivered by the teenaged boys. This year, the roses were not flowers of death with half inch thorns no one thought to remove, thank goodness! And this year, again, I was able to be grateful I wasn't in the position to be singled out from the pulpit as I was a few years ago, during another of the talks on mothers. "Everyone is a mother, even Sister X (me), who has no children, because she is the leader of the children's organization!" Umm, thanks for that, really!

I had visions of getting a picture to mark the day, but once we arrive at church, we are always so busy I don't know when I thought we'd have time. As it was, today the husband spent all of the first hour chasing J around the chapel while I spent all of the second hour rocking him in the mothers' lounge so he could take a much needed and much delayed nap. And we won't even discuss the third hour, the busiest of the three for all of us.

Then, this afternoon, we undertook a family cleaning project in our bedroom as we tried to locate the husband's wallet, which J had grabbed and then hidden yesterday. We found the wallet relatively quickly (on the floor of my walk-in closet, under some shoes) but then pressed on to make some real headway in that room, the messiest in our house by far. We were inspired by our new Expedit bookcase at the foot of the bed. It looks so crisp and clean you want everything else to match! J eventually took another nap in there somewhere, and, when he woke up, we worked on straightening the living room while watching Slumdog Millionaire (we're not done yet, so no review), which a brief break for dinner (two new dishes: black bean, corn, and tomato chowder and sweetened balsamic strawberries--both great, with only slight tweaks to the recipes). The husband is bathing the baby now and then we'll finish the movie and head off to bed. Yay!