And speaking of Sunday:

I am truly doubly blessed to have you both in my life.

Thank you to my mom for teaching me how to be brave and strive for greatness.  Thank you for teaching me how to sew and how to be organized (that one’s a work in progress).

To my mother-in-law, thank you for raising my husband to be a man of honor and integrity.  Not to mention loving and faithful and hilarious.  Thank you for loving ME from the first day we met (the feeling was mutual!).

It’s truly an embarrassment of riches.  You guys are the best!

Her sentiments, as well as those in the comments, are heartbreaking, and even as a woman with many children I can easily put myself in her place.

But I would add, that even from over here in plenty o’kids land I fully and absolutely agree that Mass (or any church service) is not the place to be acknowledged for human achievements.  Plus, I don’t want to be made to stand up in front of everyone (or worse, come up on the altar) any more than Amy wants to be left sitting in the pew.  Both are dumb.

Neither do I like the all women get a flower thing.  Please, let’s have Mass be about God.  We can celebrate or mourn on Mother’s Day on our own time in our own ways.

And thanks to Abby for finding Frankie’s Capuchin monkey-equivalent:

I have to say I took some small satisfaction in seeing someone else getting food winged at her for a change.

When we’re on long car rides I like to give the kids each a dollar to spend at the gas station, usually for cleaning the windows or something silly like that.  It’s exciting for them, of course, to be able to shop for treats, but it’s also a good lesson for them in how much things actually cost AND in how if they can work together and pool their money and agree on a couple of bigger items instead of each picking something for themselves, they can get a lot more for their money.

On our drive up to Northern California for the husband’s reunion, we stopped at one of those big gas stations in the middle of nowhere and the kids went in with their dollars.  Inside we found all the usual stuff in all the usual places.  But not a single price tag.  Not on the items, not on the shelves.  No prices.

And it wasn’t a case of Hawaii-style one price for locals one price for you, because the guy was ringing stuff up with a scanner.  He suggested that we just bring stuff up and he’d check the price for us.  But if you knew the amount of discernment that goes into my kids’ road trip treat selection you’d know that that was not going to be practical.

Unsurprisingly, everything turned out to be pretty overpriced, but we did find push-up popsicles for a dollar each and got those and got out of there.

But the idea of it still really bothers me.  The guy at the register seemed to think it was odd that I had a concern about it.  It didn’t seem to be something that other people had ever brought to his attention.  Which means that all those people stopping at this store just pick things up and buy them without particularly caring how much they cost.

It’s a scary window into a culture of credit cards and consumerism for there to be even one store in the world where people just grab stuff and swipe their cards and walk out the door, never to be bothered by the fact that they just paid $3 for a candy bar.

And finally . . . Doctor Who, because it’s my blog and so I can.

I’m into Season 5 now, which means tenth doctor is out and eleventh doctor is in.  And I have to say, to all the Doctor Who fans who told me that I would LOVE the tenth doctor by the end.  Not tolerate.  Not grudgingly admire.  But love. . . . You were totally right.

The story arc in which we watch the doctor bring all of his friends together, then slowly lose each one, watching his heartbreak and despair and self-sacrifice.  Wow.  I felt it.  He was awesome.

And all his storylines were wrapped up in such a satisfying way that I felt ready to give the new guy a chance in a way that I totally wasn’t ready to when the ninth doctor was so unexpectedly and suddenly ripped away with nothing resolved at all.  I liked that this regeneration acknowledged that he’d be a new person in a way that they tried to ignore in the last transition.

But I was left wondering about one thing.  Everyone came back, every loose end was tied up except one.  Whatever happened to the Doctor’s Daughter, Jenny?

Well, I looked into it.  It turns out that she really IS the doctor’s daughter.  Her name is Georgia Moffet and her father is the fifth doctor, Peter Davidson.  And now she’s also the doctor’s wife, because she married the tenth doctor, David Tennant, and they are expecting their third child.  So, perhaps it seemed a bit odd to delve any further into the whole being her real-life husband’s TV daughter thing.  And I’m okay with that.