The Mamas and the Tapas

So how was everyone's Mother's Day? Did everyone clean up big time? I did.

Of course, I earned it.

The day before Mother's Day, I acted as a chaperone for a school trip. This meant that I had to get up at 5:00 in the morning on a Saturday, get my children dressed in their concert finery, take them to school to be loaded on buses, ride to Gurnee, IL, sit through several performances, be re-loaded onto the buses, sit through more performances, and finally get to the big reward! for my chaperonage! and early morning middle-school concert attendance!

Which was to herd a gang of sixth-grade boys. Which is much like herding cats. Through Six Flags Great America. Which meant that I was stuck for five hours at an amusement park that fairly bristled with the kind of roller-coasters guaranteed to reduce me to a fear-stricken, jelly-legged, sobbing heap of protoplasm. While herding cats.

Well, I made it through the event unscathed. I didn't lose any of the boys. I didn't even lose my lunch. And I found out at 6:00 that my son's orchestra had totally kicked butt, having been awarded the highest grade awarded, even though they were competing against much, much larger schools. And when I got back home at 8:15 p.m., That Stud Muffin I Married had a Manhattan and a steak dinner waiting for me.

The combination of my straight-up Manhattan with my nearly empty stomach had me informing my children tearily how very, very proud of them I was before I tottered off to bed at 10:30.

So, you see, I earned the breakfast in bed, the Felco pruners, the three luscious books, the dinner out (not at Tapas Barcelona, though, because the other Mamas were hogging all the tables,) the brilliant concert, the cutting board made by my son and the colorful card made by my daughter.