Katie gave up on Clare getting up on her own. At 8am (after a 3 hour vigil) Katie arrived with a package for her Mum. The card read, "For Mummy from Katie Benny and Timmy". {Benny was quite interested...he knew he hadn't anything to do with the package... ‘This should be good... people keep getting things from me and I have no idea what they got!' Cases in point would be the Christmas gifts to his brother and sister ...Grandma's birthday gift etc etc.

The gift was a paper butterfly...with enormous antennae. Butterflies were popular this year. Benny's card was a butterfly too. Tim remembered that he had made his Mum something but couldn't remember where he put it. ... Well I remembered what I had gotten her so when I got up I got Tim's out of his backpack for him to present his little card to his Mum.

I bought a small packet of bacon at the dairy last night. Clare expressed her Mother's day wish the night before just as we were settling in for sleep..."Oh I don't want anything. You don't have to do anything." I said ‘fine' and rolled over. "If you believe that you're a dope!" was her final offer... and mentioned something about breakfast in bread with bacon. "We don't have any bacon." . . . Stony silence.

Before the kids descended on us this morning she nudged me and asked, "Did you get bacon?" I said, "Yes, but it is a surprise so you didn't hear it from me."

While I fried up the bacon, the kids emptied the dishwasher. . . one agonisingly slow item at a time. With periodic episodes of "dang"s from Tim as he dropped various articles on the floor. Fortunately the ‘dangs' were spoons (wooden mixing and soup spoons). The worrisome part is his behaviour of blowing on the item and rubbing it on his pyjamas to sanitise them. When all the dishes were unloaded and put away there was a small collection of items up for a re-spin in the dishwasher.

The kids were the ‘waiters' for this morning's Mothers Day meal. Glasses of water, cups of Tea, tomato sauce etc were ferried up to Mum in bed.

After breakfast it was off to church. Katie made a paper flower that had a drinking straw for a stem... this was from the teaching of the Apostles being the first teachers of the Word...and how Mothers are our first teachers...and a gift for them in thanks was appropriate today.

We took a trip to see Grandma after lunch. Uncle Pat was at her house so the kids had a chance to see him again, which was a treat.

Benny had been on to me about a science experiment that he had done at school. His Grandma was indulgent and allowed her kitchen to be turned into a laboratory. The ‘explosions' were mercifully subdued in nature. In Benny's words....

"You add the milk and the food colouring and then you have to add the other food colouring and then you add the dish soap...do you have yellow dish soap?... and then the soap eats the fat balls and you see the food colouring doesn't move until the fat balls are eaten up by the dish soap and then the food colour starts to move and then all the explosions start as the fat balls are eaten up and the food colour moves around!"

I have to admit I had no idea what Benny was on about until we watched the experiment in action. Uncle Pat and Grandma had front row seats to this little miracle of action/reaction and Benny was sooo pleased to be able to show off. "I'm glad I did it here at Grandma's...I have a bigger audience!"

It worked like a charm too. The soap isolated the milk fat and the water soluble food colouring was able to diffuse around into the milk. The ‘explosions' were the points in the bowl where the fat was being surrounded rapidly and the food colouring was seemingly boiling up to the surface.

Grandma was in an indulgent mood and let Katie run her own second experiment after Benny's had run its course.

We made our way home after a couple hours. Katie and I walked to the dairy and the boys put away the dishes. (I didn't find any dishes in the ‘re-wash' area... and I don't want to know about any sanitising incidents.

The kids all got stories... and now it is time to tuck them in and remind them to stay in their beds until morning.