Quick (slightly funky) Hi and Mother's Day

Edited to correct date and time, and add a quote at the end.

Hi. I feel terrible that I haven't been writing. I have two posts almost ready to go (birthday and thinking blogger award), but as you already know, my perfectionism won't let me post them until t they're fully done to my liking.

I'm at a very funky, depressive state right now. The weight and despair brought on by that committee member email is just haunting me and not letting me function well on all levels. I've been complaining a lot, something which my husband loathes with all his heart, so we have even had some discussions in the past few days. In addition, I've begun stressing out about the future, about my husband's visa not getting done on time for the closing on the house (he needs to have started on the new job so we can afford the new mortgage). It annoys even me when I start stressing out and despairing this way, but sometimes I just can't help it!

On Friday we had the home inspection and all is OK with the house. It's 16 years old, so anything wrong is just normal wear and tear. I was just delighted by the house all over again since the last time I was there (two Sundays ago, with the whole family -- including my parents and my MIL) we didn't know we were going to buy it yet. The "bad" thing is this sense of entitlement that starts to take over -- I don't want to feel entitled to the house until the closing is done and we have the keys. I know that nothing will go wrong, but still... I don't want to get over attached to the place before it's ours.

Do you remember that flower from the previous post? Our new house has not one but two of those trees in the front lawn (one large and the other smaller, marking the "border" with the neighbor's lawn). And the first thing I saw when we parked was this lovely "carpet":
I was absolutely thrilled, of course! (and I took more photos, I can post them at another time).

We had a looong weekend, including lots of church related work and activity, including unexpected guests on Saturday night and Sunday. We hosted a couple who was visiting from Virginia. They happened to have gone to boarding academy with my mother-in-law and they had recently been in touch with her! It was nice to have them and yesterday we took them to Longwood Gardens, which they loved. It was a nice day to spend Mother's Day, which we didn't otherwise celebrate since hubby was so busy last week that he didn't have time to go out and get me anything. For the record, last night he had to go to the ATM, which is inside a grocery store, so they brought me back some delicious Peppe*ridge Farms cookies and a box of my favorite brand of tea (Celestial Sea*sonings).

I read some nice Mother's Day posts yesterday and I wanted to link to two of them.

My friend Cloudscome, who is the brave single mother of a young man and two adopted little boys, wrote an "unusual" and heart-wrenching post about one of her first Mother's Day back when her older son was just a couple of years old. And my friend Anjali, wrote beautiful post listing the mothers that she thinks most about every mother's day. I make her words mine and I'd just add to her list that this is also a day in which I think with incredible sadness of all birth-mothers, or mothers who lost their child(ren) to adoption. Many of them are even denied the "title" of mother and actually the day before Mother's Day is considered the Birth-Mother's Day. I "met" many of them through blogging and reading their stories has definitely changed me deeply. Edited to add: The wise Dawn wrote, in a post titled "I'm so over Mother's Day"

I’m just sick of it. I can’t stop thinking about all the unhappy women on mother’s day, the self-conscious women on mother’s day, the women for whom mother’s day is the worst day of the year.

In spite of that, which is something I am now very aware of...

Happy Belated Mother's Day for all of you dear mothers out there!

And I'll be back soon with a book review!