Mother's Day

I was lucky enough to get to spend Mother's Day with my mom...


Lucky for me, she lives at the beach. We spent a wonderful weekend playing bocce with Gran and Da...


eating sand...


looking adorable...


giving smoldering looks to passing dogs...


venturing into the still cold ocean...


building sandcastles...


going to church in downtown Charleston...


and talking to moms and grandmothers on the phone...


I love this picture because it captures my mom perfectly- smiling on the beach with her sunglasses and visor on, the wind blowing her hair and the sun shining down on her:)


Here's a poem my mom sent me that I love:

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

It was the best Mother's Day I could have asked for- to be with my beautiful children and my beautiful mom in a beautiful place. Speaking of which, our too-short visit inspired me to begin planning a great escape sometime in late September- a week at the beach at my mom's with NO KIDS!!!