Today, (Sunday may 10) is as many of you are no doubt aware, is Mother's day. I had a nice relaxing day mostly. My brothers came over and we sat around chatting for a while. No one believes me but this is true: I measured my son on Friday; he had not grown since February 22. I measured him today because he looked suspiciously tall, and he was, indeed, 1.25 inches taller. Everyone says I made a mistake Friday, but I didn't. He is now 5'9" tall and still 13, and he grew 1.25 inches in two days.

This meant I had to do some quick shopping so that he has more than one pair of pants that fit him (the trusty, next-size-up pants I always buy). Plus he needed some new shirts and a new jacket. Sigh. I am poor now. My Mother's Day was unexpectedly expensive.

Then it was time to take down the garbage, and my son could only find one shoe. Normally, I would just tell him to look a little harder but since there was company, the Border Collie was all excited and one of the things she does when she is excited is pick up a shoe when a door opens somewhere and dash outside with it. Then when the excitement wears off, she drops the shoe wherever she might happen to be at the time the adrenaline rush is over for her. This explains, for example, why there was a yellow rain boot standing in the middle of the driveway when I came home one afternoon. And why one time I found a sneaker in the orchard. There are five acres here and we often find shoes in the darnedest places.

So the missing shoe is actually kind of worrisome. It's Sunday and getting on toward dark and there's school tomorrow and the tallest person in the house has grown out of the emergency shoes that used to belong to his Uncle Matthew. I had visions of having to send him to school in his slippers. They're nice slippers and all, but still. He's only 13 and that sort of thing could scar him for life. It's even possible that the shoe could be in the pond because the other thing the Border Collie does when she's done running around is go lie down in the pond. It cools her off. Which I knew she'd done because I saw her at the sliding glass door in the kitchen dripping wet and with her nose covered with duckweed.

We got back to the house and the search began. Fortunately he found his shoe -- in his room where, I am quite sure, if it had been a snake it would have bit him when he was looking for his shoe before.

I'm reading Agnes and The Hitman by Crusie and Mayer, and finding it wonderfully hilarious.

No writing today. Oops. Didn't get any more done on implementing the new website either. Oops.

So, how was your mother's day? Any stories about odd pet behaviors or kids who grow overnight?

Labels: mother's day, reading, shoes, writing