OK I admit it - these are Easter pictures that I never got around to posting because I couldn't come up with anything to write about them other than "look how cute [I think] my kids are." However today, it does remind me of a story.

When I was in first grade, my teacher taught us about the wonderful holiday of May Day. We learned to dance around the May Pole and how it was the custom to take flowers and put them on someone's doorstep on May Day, ring the doorbell and then run away so the person would have a lovely reminder of Spring as a surprise. My teacher had us all make a paper basket of paper flowers that day to take home to our parents. We even spritzed them with perfume for the full effect. I was six and I believed everything everyone told me back then. I had no way of knowing we were learning about a holiday that few people even knew about anymore, much less celebrated. So when I got home from school, I carefully placed the handmade, smelly flowers on the doorstep, stepped back, rang the doorbell and then ran to hide behind a bush in the yard, waiting expectantly for my mother to answer the door, look down and find my gorgeous bouquet, then weep tears of joy.

No one came to the door.

I rang the bell again.

No one answered.

This was repeated three or four more times until finally, I could see from my hiding place behind the bush that my mother was coming to the door. I waited with halted breath while she opened the door, stuck her head outside and yelled at me to STOP RINGING THAT DAMN DOORBELL!

Later, when she found out what I was really trying to do, she felt badly and I believe she has saved those paper flowers to this day. She still talks about how guilty she feels about that incident and how it wasn't one of her proudest parenting moments... but after having heard The Caterpillar push that Staples That Was Easy Button about one-thousand-seventy-three times in the past twenty minutes, I know exactly how she must have felt.

Happy May Day, everyone!