My Happy Mother's Day

First let me just say that I can not stand to have my picture taken (which is why I have yet to put a picture of me on my blog profile). But since it was Mother's Day I decided that it would be nice to have a picture of me and the three kiddos - and my new bird bath which was part of my Mother's Day present (the other part was cleaning out the garage - and yes, that was a good thing but more on that later).

We tried to take some photos with all of us standing near the bird bath, but since Mia wanted to jump out of my arms into the bird bath we had to rethink that idea. So we decided to all squat around the birdbath. (I wonder how many professional photographers actually tell their subjects to squat - probably not too many, but that's OK.) We ended up with a couple of shots that were pretty decent. Here's one of my favorites.

We are all looking in the general direction of the camera with mostly sincere expressions of happiness on our faces.

As soon as that was done, everyone went inside and scrambled to get out of their church clothes as quickly as possible (heaven forbid anyone have to keep on a shirt with a collar for more than five minutes). Then we moved on to the BIG gift of the day - cleaning out the garage.

We have tried to do this numerous times, but my poor husband freaks out every time because it was soooo overwhelming to him. And rightly so - we have entirely too much junk. But he promised me that since it was Mother's Day and I've been bugging him for months to do this he would try not to self-combust before we were finished. The kids agreed to help too - since it was Mother's Day and since most of it was their junk anyway.

We moved EVERYTHING out of the garage and then went through every item -- from sports equipment to screws. Then we sorted like every good organizational guru tells you to do: KEEP, DONATE/SELL and TRASH. And boy did we have a lot of items that fell into the last two categories which was the goal. Then we organized the keep items and we'll finish up this weekend by taking loads to the dump and to Goodwill and hope that we can get rid of some of the larger items on Craig's list.

(I realize it still looks a little messy, but we couldn't very well leave the trash and the donate/sell items in the driveway for the week. The neighbors wouldn't have appreciated that.)

And that was my Mother's Day - maybe it wasn't glamorous or pampering, but it was something I wanted to do. And I spent it with the four most important people in my life. There was very little complaining and I believe they even had a little fun at times.