7 quick takes Friday (Vol. 10)

When we enrolled the boys in preschool, I was surprised to discover just how much the teachers genuinely cared about our children. They share stories about our sons with me, celebrate their successes, offer advice, and don’t roll their eyes when I ask them not to tell my son to stop sucking his thumb.

So for Teacher Appreciation Week I was determined to celebrate them. On Wednesday I was ready to deliver baked goods when we discovered we were taking a sick day instead. By Thursday morning the baked goods were no longer intact.

So I went to the dollar store, bought floral flyswatters for each of the teachers, wrote a poem to tie to the handles, and spent last night getting them ready.

Then Leo got sick, and we found ourselves missing yet another school day on Friday.

Fortunately the gifts won’t get stale before next week. The boys are so excited to give them to their teachers, which was part of the appeal to me. I like it when our children are giving gifts they are excited to give.

As you can probably tell, this gift idea didn’t come from Pinterest. This was the idea of a desperate mother who believes people can always use more flyswatters and poetry.

Ah, Mother’s Day, the one day of the year when John makes sure I don’t have to cook dinner. But it’s not all about me, or even my mother, grandmothers, and friends and family who are mothers.

You see, there are two mothers on the other side of the world who have been on my mind especially this week. There are also women who took care of our sons while they were in China, and they mothered our sons until we could hold them in our arms.

One of them was our older son’s foster mother, a truly amazing woman who loved him with a love as deep as any mother’s. She gave him the tremendous gift of knowing what it was to be loved, and to be part of a family. We send her photos of Leo from time to time, and the last time we received photos of her looking at his pictures. Look at this one of her waving to our son from thousands of miles away.

I’m honored to share Mother’s Day with so many amazing women.

Leo’s teacher asked him questions about me for Mother’s Day. He got everything just right except for my age, which he overshot by…well…not that much, actually:

Today is my sister Treasa’s birthday and also her half-anniversary. It’s hard to believe the newlyweds have been married six months. While I work on baking and decorating the cake for her party tomorrow, with the help of two rather ambitious junior chefs, why don’t you relax and watch their amazing first dance?

One of the many reasons we were excited about Treasa marrying George was that George’s brother is a Baltimore City firefighter. He generously invited the boys to come see his fire station last weekend, and they were almost as curious about everything as I was.

Did you know firefighters still slide down poles? And they use the same bell the station used in 1907 to wake them up for a fire? I had no idea. Daniel keeps asking to go back just to see “the man slide down the pole.”

We didn’t let the boys use the pole. They had to take the stairs.

I had heard that the Walters Art Museum had placed reproductions of paintings around Baltimore, and we saw our first one when we stopped at a playground this week.

You can see it made quite an impression on Leo.

If you missed the touching guest post my friend Laura wrote for my blog earlier this week, 10 things a special-needs mom learned (the hard way), take a few minutes to read it. It’s a powerful piece—and I’m not the only one who thinks so. I’m so excited to see all the visitors who have stopped by to read Laura’s post!

See more quick takes at Jen’s blog.