The Best Mother's Day

Laurel's stone.

Miah's pearl.

Miah's new pool.  She's so excited!

Yesterday was a great day.  We got up early and Jay made pancakes, of course, because it was Sunday.  We watched "I love Lucy" which is Miah's new obsession.  I really wanted to get the back yard back to yard status, rather than jungle, so we mowed, raked, cleaned, and burnt leaves.  Miah and I cleaned out the-sand pit-once garden area.  Laurel didn't want to do the work, so she doesn't get to swim.  Miah REALLY wanted the pool, so she was on her knees plucking weeds out of the sand, and then later went to town with the rake.  She's so excited to get into the pool after school that she may explode in class.
After we cleaned up, we drove around town trying to find a restaurant that wasn't stuffed to the gills with crazy people.  It didn't occur to me that Sunday was an all around bad day to go out, but it was too late by then, so we braved the crowds.  We actually found a really nice Chinese place that was not very crowded.  We paused for a minute, wondering if the lack of crowd meant that the place was bad...but we took a chance because the place is off the beaten path a bit.  It turned out to be a good bet.  Minus the ass a table away who thought he had to yell into his blue tooth, it was nice.  We made a joke out of the jerk, Jay repeating everything he said out loud, and me staring a hole into the back of his head and making funny faces.  The guy turned around a couple of times, and it was hilarious.
After lunch we headed over to the theater, where we saw "Something Borrowed".  We loved it.  Laugh-out-loud funny.  We weren't very happy about the ending, but there is a sequel to the book (we haven't read the two books yet, but after seeing the movie we will be.  I already bought them on my kindle at half price) so we are hoping that things pan out the way we would like them to.
We stopped by Target to pick up a pool, and while we were driving Jay crazy by stopping every few minutes to ogle something on a shelf, he got ahead of us a bit in the shampoo aisle.  The girls and I thought it would be funny to evade him for a while.  This included sticking Miah's head out at the end of the aisle to spy, running like crazy to the next one, and giggling.  We almost ran into this older gentleman twice, making him giggle too.  He later saw Jay, took pity on him, and told on us.  Rotten luck!  It was hysterical though.  I had been peeking at Jay at the end of one aisle, and he was making funny gestures, looking around, and throwing his arms up in frustration.  Then when he wasn't looking we ran up behind him to ninja him, but he turned around.  It still makes me laugh.
After that we went home, set up the pool, read on the back porch for a while, watched Bones from this week, and went to bed.  Jay got to stay up a little bit and read because he got a break on going to PT this morning since he worked two doubles at the end of last week.  This means he got to sleep in till 6:30 this morning.  Three and a half extra hours of sleep!
I couldn't have had a better day.  Jay bought me two Pandora beads for my bracelet, one for Laurel, and one for Miah.  He was all excited about the Pandora store at the mall here, and insists that I must go see it.  Apparently it's full of beads and jewelry, and it's beautiful.  I told him that it would be hard for me to leave the store without something, and he said, "Just tell yourself you can only have one bead, and you'll be okay."  Is he nuts!?