Mrs. Lucken has a laptop!

I can no longer blame my lack of updates on lack of computer access...or lack of a totally awesome husband. This is my best Mother's Day gift ever, and makes up for no gift or card (!) last year. Although to be fair, last year I said I didn't want to celebrate Mother's Day as it was during one of my bad chemo weekends. How amazing it is to have hair, and to be feeling great...and to remember so strongly what it was like to not be this way. Life, or should I say, vibrancy, is SUCH a gift. Now I'll just be blaming my lack of updates on the fact that I am embracing that vibrancy -frittering all of my time away in the garden...or training for the 3-day (those are long walks!). As my sister so lovingly says, "I know this is the time of the year that I can never get a hold of you..."

To make it even more difficult to reach me, I am taking my show on the road. Tomorrow I leave for San Francisco to get in on the baby and toddler action at the Gibbs household!!!!!!!! I am very excited to meet my nephew and to see my niece, and so thankful to my husband, sister, aunt, and mother-in-law for taking over some of my mom duties for this week. I plan to help the parents of the new baby get some rest and enjoy their awake moments with their children more!

And now, back to Mother's Day talk...I received some lovely presents from my children, as well...flowers, a necklace and a bookmark from Katie, an adorable butterfly print, a necklace and a cute little Q and A session from Nathan, and Emma (darling that she is) made a card on hotel stationary, and scrounged some bath gel and green tea and necklace accessories from The H in Midland (where we were staying for her first real "away" soccer tournament) to pull together some Mother's Day presents.

Lastly, Bill dropped me off at the Dow Gardens in Midland in between games to give me some alone time in my favorite kind of place. To make things utterly complete, I lost my iPhone in said gardens (I am nearly always irresponsible if I don't have some children to be watching...it's like the freedom makes me drunk). I was freaking out until I realized that some mothers can give their children hugs and kisses, and some mothers have to spread their motherly love in other ways. Mine always comes through in the clutch, helping me find things that I lose irresponsibly in a vast place (this isn't the first time something like this has happened!) And so I found them, in a garden of immense size in which I had been roaming aimlessly for hours. AND I made it back in time to see my daughter play in the championship game in her tournament. Happy Mother's Day to you, too, Mom!