It’s true, homeschool Moms don’t get a Mother’s Day.
Where do kids make their Mother’s Day cards and their cute little crafts to present to Moms during breakfast in bed?
They make them at school.
Can you imagine that homeschool scene?
“Okay kids, everyone gather around we’re going to make a craft for me.”
Right after my kids fall out of their seat from laughing, then the complaints would start.
“Mom, do I have to make it like that?”
“Can I make them shooting guns?”
“I wanted to make mine chartreuse, is that okay?”*
After I’d herded them into doing the craft in my head and gotten something approximating the right craft. Just think of how much fun it would be and how self-aggrandizing to announce:
“Everybody get a pencil, now you’re going to write me a letter saying, ‘Thank you Mommy for being a good Mom.’ Make sure you use proper punctuation and capitalize everything correctly. Oh, and use your best handwriting. When you surprise me with this letter on Mother’s Day I want to be able to read it.”
That’s not going to happen. Instead all of the kids in school get bullied into doing this by their teachers**. I remember teaching first grade and carefully planning out the Mother’s Day craft and writing project.
It was called “My Mom wears many hats.” It was a shape book, and it had 8 pages. Each page they kids came up with a different hat the Mom wore and wrote a sentence about it. ‘My Mom wears a chef hat. She makes me spaghetti.” The p and s would be adorably switched and I would leave it alone because I knew that would be an adorable memory, but I made them write in their best handwriting.
You know what, it’s weird to have my kids write those things.
It just feels weird to stand in front of them as they sit at their desks and says, “Okay now write down all of the jobs I do at home, and come up with clever sentences.”
It just does.
So, on Mother’s Day I won’t wake up to an adorable craft put together by my kids with the teacher’s help. I don’t get the flower pens in a terra-cotta pot, or the acrostic poem about M-O-T-H-E-R, where the kids really struggle to come up with something for “H” because all the words they can think of start with G. And the R always starts with “Really _______.”
You know what I will get?
I’ll get a hug.
I’ll get slightly burned toast with LOTS of butter, because my daughter loves butter, and cinnamon sugar.
I’ll wake up to whispers of “don’t wake her up as you bring her the food,” or the always worrisome, “don’t spill the tea as you walk in,” because I’m sure my daughter has picked out one of the fancy tea cups because it’s a “special occasion.”
There will be lots of love, because I have a wonderfully supportive husband who will remind the kids it’s Mother’s Day, and they should make me a card. The boys will spend 5 minutes drawing me super-heroes or Minecraft figures. Princess will spend 20 minutes drawing and writing out the perfect card in her mind.
And, for a minute I’ll regret not getting the adorable craft, and the writing project that I know was labored over for weeks in their school classroom. But, I won’t regret for a minute my choice to homeschool and the extra memories and hugs I have because of it.
*Chartreuse according to my colored pencils is a rather ugly shade of yellow/green. I had always thought of it as a pink color because in my head that words sound pinkish. To this day I still think of it as pink despite knowing otherwise.
**No, I don’t think they’re really bullied. I’m exaggerating for the sake of a story. It’s a bad habit of mine, one I’m not likely to overcome any century soon (see I did it again, I’m not going to live over a century)
Too true! Except I think I remember being bullied 🙂
I”m sure there was more than one kid who was bullied, but I was trying to allow most kids weren’t 🙂
Love this! and btw, I always thought chartreuse was a pinkish color too!
It just SOUNDS pink.
Love this! I have always thought the same thing, too!
So glad to hear I’m not alone.
Yep. I pulled my kids out of public school two years ago and now it is a standing joke around here after Mother’s Day for me to complain about my kids’ craptastic teacher who didn’t have them make a craft for me.
And what do you mean chartreuse isn’t some shade of pink?? Are we sure about this? Because it has always sounded pink-ish to me…
I’m glad to hear I’m not alone. No, it’s a shade between yellow and green, that looks somewhat neon-ish.
Ha ha ha ha, “craptastic teacher,” I could picture myself mumbling something like that under my breath.
Oh, and 100% sure, I even googled it to make sure.
LOVED this post, Ticia! It actually made me cry! Lol! I’d rather receive the spontaneous hugs, the time with my children, the memories we’ve made & are making, & the loving family bond we have than any contrived Mother’s Day crafts.
99% of the time I would too, right this moment when all three kids are fussy, I’d take having a few hours to myself.
I still have the pillow my oldest made me when he was in Kindergarten. Man that teacher was on fire! Handprints and all.
That would be an awesome present. My Mom still has the handprint Christmas tree I made in 2nd grade. She hangs it up every Christmas.
Ticia, this is great! I actually was laughing out loud at this.
“Let’s make mommy a card today!” Lol!
I know, I just keep picturing that in my head, and it just looks so weird.
So true! I’m snort laughing at the imagery of standing over them telling them to write me a love note. I’ll just take doing their math without complaint!
I’ll take that too!
You always manage to crack me up Ticia, and I just love your exaggerations – Thank goodness they’ll be around for the next century or so or I might have outlived them! An early Happy Mother’s day to you!
And to you too!
Love it! So true!
You have the gift of not having to worry about getting lunches made and backpacks in order and them off to school in time for the early bell Monday morning…
Believe me that is high on my list of awesome reasons for homeschooling. HIGH on my list.
LOVE this. I am glad you wrote this post. Makes things so real and love so tangible.
Thank you! After our email I figured I should get going on typing this up rather than just playing about with it in my head.
I teared up! Very true and very lovely. Happy sigh. It is very good to be a homeschool, carefully written mother’s day card or not!
I hope you had a wonderful day.
I’m sure I will (our Mother’s Day is on Sunday, and my daughter being the lover of all things celebration is already trying to make this into the most over the top thing she can get us to agree to).
Perfectly put 🙂 I will never forget chartreuse a green. There was one particular skiing holiday in my 20’s where a rather nasty French concoction called – inventively – Green Chartreuse – featured way too heavily in the evenings …
That sounds like a very different story.
So true!! Cute post!
Great post! Só true… 🙂
Chartreuse is not pink? It does sound pinkish, and I just assumed it was! My kids never had teachers who made them do week long crafts or writing projects before Mother’s Day. They do Mother’s Day crafts in Sunday school however.
I know! Me too.
Interesting, I’m used to the Mother’s Day craft being a standard part of school in May.