Mother's Day

I had a very delightful Mother's Day yesterday.  Long ago, I released Aaron from the hassle of buying something for me on Mother's Day (& Valentine's Day).  I prefer he does things because he wants to, not because he 'has' to.  And he does.  Throughout the year, he'll surprise me with little things here and there, lilies he picks from a ditch as he drives home from work, a bar of chocolate, a little note expressing his love, etc.  All of these things are way more meaningful to me than an obligatory card he picked up with overpriced flowers.  So all that to say that my extreme enjoyment of the day was due to getting to spend the day with my family, not because of some amazing thing I received.  And since Abby's birthday is always near Mother's Day, we end up having a little celebration in honor of her with my side of the family.  Three years in a row now, Abby's birthday cake of choice is a "funfetti" angel food cake.  Why?  Because it has jelly beans pictured on the box of cake mix.  So we have to buy jelly beans to decorate her cake.  Here is the cake, pre-jelly beans.  The cute candles were courtesy of my mother.

Enjoying our singing to her.

Blowing out the candles.

Ana wanted to be the camera person while Abby opened her gifts.  Abby was very cooperative and insisted upon a picture of every item she received.  Here she is displaying her card for the camera.

This picture is cute due to her expression.  She loves having tea parties, however her old tea set got broken awhile ago and I wasn't able to glue it together in a usable way.  So she was sans tea pot, cup, and sugar bowl.  She let Grandma Cindy know that she would like a new tea set for her birthday and lo and behold, that is what she got!  She was very excited about it.  She spent the next little while at the table having her own personal tea party - using iced tea instead of hot tea. 

My dad, Ana and I went mushroom hunting after the fun of present opening happened.  We spent more time making our way through the thorns than finding mushrooms.  Ana was the only successful hunter of the group.  But we still had fun.  And Ana enjoyed climbing around dead trees and living trees.  We came across a pine tree that she just had to climb since the branches were like steps all the way to the top.  I stopped looking the higher she got and as she said things like "I feel the tree swaying in the wind."  I remember climbing super high in trees.  Now I know why it bothered my mother at the time.  : ) 

Questions for you:  Did you do anything fun for Mother's Day? 

Do you expect/hope for presents that day?

Did you enjoy tree climbing when younger, or still do? I still like to climb trees and like to get high, but I have a hard time watching my own kids do the same.