AJ forgot about his decision to let me sleep in and woke me up anyway with a �Happy Mother�s Day,� which I wouldn�t have missed for all the world. He made me a card, a collage with a very smilely striped bee and a big orange flower. He carefully drew veins on the flower�s leaves and a stinger on the back of the bee. Out of the bee�s mouth comes a speech balloon that says, �You,re|a Honey of a mom! [He mixes up commas and apostrophes. The line between You�re and a was drawn to separate the words that got a little too close together. And the �f� on of is backwards]. It�s perfect.

The card came with a birdhouse that AJ picked out for us to hang up in the yard. My husband made a card too. He gave me some new grass shears, which I desperately need, although I managed to slice open my wrist on the blade, leading to several jokes about Mother�s Day making me suicidal.

AJ was very disappointed that his Mothers� Day plans, which were to have included a bike ride and a picnic, were rained out. Instead, we spent the morning lounging in bed with coffee and the paper while AJ did Mad Libs and made us giggle.

The rest of the morning was spent at the garden center, where AJ and I bought some tomato and herb plants for the deck planters and at a couple of antique shops where I almost bought two framed prints of insects and a map of Sussex, but didn�t.

We spent the afternoon at my mother-in-law�s eating far too much (which is really synonymous with time spent at my mother-in-law�s) and running laps around the block to keep up with AJ pedaling away on his bike.

It was a lovely day.

We also managed to get out on Saturday night. I went to a movie with my husband for the first time since I was pregnant with AJ. We picked the film in part because it was playing in a lovely 1920s era movie house not too far from us that we�d been wanting to see. The film, Thank You for Smoking, was consequently much better than expected. The film has received mixed reviews, both far too extreme for the film, which was very funny, evenly paced and with enough of a bite to make the sweetness palatable but in the end quite conventional. Rob Lowe as a crazy Hollywood exec is hilarious. Almost as hilarious, however, was the guy sitting behind us in the theater who, every time he thought something was funny, would chortle and then repeat the last half of the line under his breath. Some acquaintances from the neighborhood with a child AJ�s age ended up sitting two rows in front of us. After the movie, the husband (whom I know less well than the wife), said, �Well you certainly enjoyed the movie,� which I took to mean either that I was laughing to loudly (always possible) or that they hadn�t thought the movie was funny at all (given my past experiences of my neighbors� conservatism and general senses of humor, also possible). It�s nice to be a grown up sometimes. In junior high, such comments seem biting. Now they are simply yet another source of amusement.

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