Our Mother’s Day ritual is that I stay in bed while Paul gets up with the kids and helps them get together their cards and presents then they all descend upon me with effusive love and, sometimes, coffee. Usually I fake sleep so that can have the pleasure of waking me, but this year my slumber was genuine. I was crashed. They barged in shouting “Happy Mother’s Day!” and all handed me their cards as they clambered onto the bed. I hugged each one and announced I would be going from youngest to oldest. Eden’s card was a yellow piece of construction paper on which a piece of blue construction paper, folded in half, had been rakishly glued at an angle. On the blue paper Eden had drawn something that, when I first saw it, could have been a heart, possibly a barn with a silo, but was actually a “rainbow chick”. Now that I know, I can only see a bird.

Inside it was filled with Paul’s hand writing. Clearly there had been some dictation.

Dear Mom,

I love you ’cause you’re you Mommy, I love anyway, anything, anyway and anything. Mommy, you’re beautiful and pretty. And you can call Daddy a angel, but he doesn’t go in the sky. I love you anywhy! Case. Nice. Pretty. Mommy, you are the one and the kind. A little more stuff. Happy Mother’s Day, Eden efghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Does it get any better than that? We have compliments on my personal beauty, declarations of unconditional love, fantastic rhyming, most of the alphabet…what else is there?

Coffee, there was coffee.