Mother's Day

This was the fourth year we spent camping over Mother's Day weekend.  We go to a family camp about four hours from our house and it is great!  We stay in a cabin and everything is planned for us and all meals are prepared for us.  All I have to do is choose an activity and relax.  We spent a lot of time just hiking around the grounds, doing a little canoeing and boating, and looking for gnomes.  The people at the family camp hid 5 gnomes and bunny foo-foo for the kids to find.  If you find one, you get a little prize.  Well, it took us four years, but we finally found one!  The kids were bound and determined this year and lo and behold, bunny foo-foo made it into our hands.  The kids were SO excited!  That didn't stop them from trying to find another one, though...however, we were only successful with the one find.

Four of the five gnomes and bunny foo-foo!

One of the other things I love about this place is the Sunday morning Mother's Day ritual.  They call all the little kids into the kitchen and give each one of them a flowering plant to give to their mother.  It makes me cry every time!  So sweet to see them all pouring out of the kitchen with their flowers, so excited to give them to their mothers.  While it's a long drive to the campground, it's always well worth it.  

On the man note....there is seriously something wrong with me.  This man is head over heels in love with me and just wants to do anything he can to make me happy and I'm just not feeling the same for him.  On Saturday before Mother's Day, he drove four hours to get to the campground so he could give me my Mother's Day present (okay, it's less than an hour and a half from where he lives, but he got lost).  He gave me a beautiful Pandora bracelet with the kids' birthstones on it...so, it's pretty much a Mother's bracelet.  A few weeks ago, he drove out to visit me for the weekend and spent all day Saturday painting an apartment I'm trying to renovate, then all day Sunday and Monday working on the landscaping for that apartment and then my own landscaping.  All while I did stuff with the kids and worked.  He even took the kids and me out for a very nice dinner on Saturday night (the kids were really excited to get dressed up).  I'm telling you, all he wants to do is make me happy!  So, what the hell is wrong with me?  He's the perfect package...successful, sexy, smart and wants to treat me like a queen.

Okay, now for the things that are making me a little crazy about him (not in a good way).  He cries a lot.  What's up with that?  That is not normal.  He tells me all the time that he's crying because he misses me.  Okay, kind of endearing....ONCE IN AWHILE....I was in his town a month ago for a board meeting and we met for coffee before I hit the road to come home.  He started crying because he said he wanted to take a break in our relationship for awhile but didn't want to lose me as a friend.  Then he called me three times on my drive home.  That's not a break!  Is anyone else beginning to sense a little bit of a personality disorder?  One thing I don't need is a  man who needs to be medicated.  There are other things about his personality that are grating on me...not sure how to explain them, but I can feel my blood pressure start to rise whenever he calls.  I really like being treating like a queen, but not sure how much longer I can deal with the personality stuff.  We'll see.

On another note, some of you may remember me telling you about a good friend of mine who was murdered while traveling in Ind!a with her son a couple years ago...the even more shocking part about it was that it was her son who murdered her.  I knew this kid and had traveled extensively with him.  Who knew he had the ability to kill his own mother harbored inside him.  Well, to make a long story short...he was convicted over there and sentenced to three years detention...the max for minors according to their law.  Friday, the news reported that he was acquitted and is on his way home.  Unbelievable.  I'm sure his father paid a lot of money to make that happen, and, of course, as a mother, I would do the same for my child -- whatever it took to bring him home.  He's now almost 18 and, in time, no one will ever know what he did.  I'm very sad that he is not paying for his crime AND that he's learning at a young age that money can buy your innocence in a court of law.  But at the same time, I feel really sorry for him.  He's going to have to live for the rest of his life with the images of her last moments haunting him.  I'm sure he's set himself up for a very difficult and screwed up future.  I hope he's able to get some help and finally realize the depth of the horrible crime he committed.