Mother's Day, a rookie move, and 'murica.

They say that all good things must come to an end (although- knock on wood- they keep making wine and cheesecake) and it looks like this is really going to happen tomorrow.

Finley definitely treated it like she treats any other valuable.

But first, we celebrated Mother's Day. And even though May is an absolute hurricane of a month for us all, Seth managed to make it special. Although we did commit a classic rookie error and take the kids to brunch.

(Parents of small children are like: "nooooooo. Brunch is at naptime. You cannot enjoy brunch for roughly 8 more years. Idiots." They are correct.)

We took the kids back to our newly-discovered favorite spot, the Towne Crier Cafe, where we had had a spontaneous (thanks to Seth) Friday night date at a truly incredible dinner show by this guy we had never heard of. The raspberry chocolate torte didn't suck either. We laughed, we stayed out too late, Seth let me drink way more Tempranillo than I should have, and we remembered how much we love live music- and each other. We don't do it often, but when we have a date night we do it right.

So of course we wanted to take the kids, and Seth made reservations for Mother's Day brunch with a ukelele show. It sounded great, and it started off that way.

 Finley, as per usual, loved the music ("I ballerina" with her new Elsa doll),

Ford cracked his Dad up begging for bloody mary olives,

and somewhere between my tasty mimosa and actually getting to eat, both kids totally lost their ever loving minds. There's no reason to dwell on the details. Let's just say brunch ended up like this in the parking lot.

You win some, you lose some, and once we had recovered (and some of us had napped) we headed to the Ryans' for a Mother's Day BBQ complete with bounce house- we travel with ours now- hilarious kid dance parties, more mimosas, and a terrible pooping incident in which (maybe by way of a late Mother's Day gift?) Finley handed me the dirty diaper she had just removed from herself, and earned herself a bath.

And guns.

Oh, and football. Basically, 'murica.

Natalie and I had a real toast to the idea of an actual Mother's Day "night off" for Moms (all men having mysteriously vanished around the time of the diaper incident),

and a laugh-til-your-sides-hurt time was still had by all. I can't manage to upload the amazing kid dance party videos, but if you haven't seen them shoot me a line and I'll find a way to email or text them. They make life worth living.

Cheers! and a big HMD to everybody on this crazy roller coaster. My fondest hope for all of us is to laugh more often than we cry. Minus the baby meringue kind of tears, of course.