Mum's gone cuckoo

Mother's Day is a day when you get to stay in bed until someone kicks you out or you get a cramp in your foot and have to walk it off. Or smell the french toast cooking and decide that watching Lark Rise to Candleford on BBC America is as much culture you can take before noon.
     I loved getting the flowers, snapdragons and big gerber daisies, and the socks.  I love getting socks because for some reason I can never find the ones I like but Sweetpea has an eye for them and roots them out for every suitable occasion.  But the best part about Mother's Day are the handmade cards, and the sentiments in the one you get from the man who knows you became a much better person the day our daughter arrived.  Sweetpea is getting quite funny in her advanced age of nine, and I like to think it came from me but I know it came from her father so she better have some good jokes ready when his day arrives in June.  Payback time for the plastic faces, bad puns, and general goofiness that comes from his end of the table every dinnertime.  It may come as a surprise to those who think my husband is a reserved and mysterious person.  Take it from me, he's not.  He just loves a good audience and a toddler got him started eight years ago and he's never stopped.

Yes, I was pampered all day and given a break from laundry, but I still had to water the strawberry plants, and the blueberries, and the avocado tree and the.....well you get the idea.  It was bloomin' hot yesterday and life goes on. But the best part of the day was learning how to prepare and can peach jam.  One of my presents was a six pack of canning jars (tactfully accompanied by a coupon for a facial and peppermint foot scrub) because we had a bumper crop of peaches this year.  Since I missed most of them last year when I was in Ireland I was determined to a) not let one of them go bad on the tree, and b) deny the snails one more juicy meal.
     Did I mention how much I hate snails?  It was difficult to explain to Sweetpea because she has two of them  as pets in a turtle terrarium (thanks, Spongebob), and she can't understand why I want to kill every one of them I find.  But when the peaches began to ripen she finally understood.  The snails, despite various anti-snail methods including ground eggshells, lids filled with beer, and tiny spikes around the trunk, manage to slime their way up the tree and insert their tiny jagged teeth into the bottom of almost every peach....just as it has reached ripened perfection. In case you are wondering, snails can live as long as 5 years, 15 in captivity. I bet you didn't know snails had teeth, either.  Believe me, after watching them decimate a carrot in Sweetpea's terrarium and then shit it out in record time, I am a believer.  They also love to wait until the strawberries are one second away from being ready to pick to strike.  They come in the dead of night and then slime away before we get up.  It's not a fair fight.
     I denuded the tree on Saturday and on Sunday pitted 50 small peaches to make what turned out to be a mere four jars of jam.  Four little jars, I might add.  Pure gold.  I used the freezer method because while I received the canning jars, I did not get the canner, which apparently is necessary for boiling the jam-filled jars.  But freezer jam tastes better anyway because the peaches are not cooked, so I'm looking forward to eating a bit of the tree's bounty over the next few months and thumbing my nose at the snails.

Finally, there is the cuckoo clock now installed in the kitchen.  It was my official mother's day present - and it arrived from Germany in time to chirp the hours on my special day.  For those of you who want a quick, zen-like break from your busy day, just watch the video above and, if you follow the pendulum back and forth long enough and ignore the dancers marking out the minutes, you may actually lower your blood pressure. Please remember it took me two long hours to pick this one out and it cuckoos every hour on the hour whether we like it or not.

It was a glorious day, as I'm sure it was for all mothers who have children, or who love nieces, nephews, honorary children, etc.  It's a great job.  However, there is a postscript to the festivities. Mother's Day actually ended this morning because I got a sheepish phone call from my husband who said he forgot that Sweetpea had put a special notice in the local newspaper for me.
     "But it's in the trash!" I wailed.
Oh well, I spent the next hour in the blinding 90 degree sun rifling madly through a very stinky garbage pail out back looking for the paper until I finally found it stuck to a pizza box.  The page my husband had me look for is now tacked to the bulletin board in the laundry room while it dries out, but I can make out the words very clearly:

I love you Mum.

You just can't hear that enough, no matter how hard it may be to get to it.

Happy Mothers Day to everyone.  Just for fun pretend the day lasts all year long.