It’s Mothers’ Day in the UK and here in sleepy Tebstrup in Denmark this Brit stumbled out of bed to find the boys had made mothers’ day cards for me, Ben had even been out to pick flowers for me, I could smell croissants cooking, and then Steve appeared as if by magic with coffee and a syrup waffle for me!

Of course I had to share the waffle with Erika and also had to share my croissants but hey. I didn’t do ANY prep for this. Didn’t even mention (didn’t get chance, I don’t think) to Steve that it was mothers’ day! It meant a lot to me. And also showed up the fact that we actually feel settled here. It’s been years and years since we’ve felt like this. And it’s the first time since my very first Mothers’ Day that I’ve not hoped, or prepped, or dropped hints. It was completely unexpected.

We also got Erika into her new jumper which must be okay, as she’s not asked to take it off all day!

I got some time outside with Ben a bit later, we went adventuring following some of last night’s deer tracks (and saw various different animal droppings which I intend to try and identify later, I’ll leave the images at the end of this post, you have been warned!!) to see where they might be coming from. I saw plenty of tracks in the neighbouring field and also found the remains of a fence that must have run along another edge of our land. And I took pictures, having fun trying to get the right combination of shots for the perfect double-exposure to make into a mothers’ day card for my mum.

While I was outside taking pictures, Erika was helping Steve in the workshop – I LOVE that she loves to do this! As soon as I get the video from Steve I’ll add it in, it’s beautiful!

Erika has napped (why can’t she do this during the week as well?!) and I was able to play Minecraft with Ben, we finally got to explore a desert temple together (we’ve only been waiting months for this opportunity!) and set up a new base camp together on one of my early worlds. I showed the boys how to make and customise banners to put on their shields and Charley got so interested that he took over and kept my phone (with minecraft’s wiki site open at the banners page) near him so he could design more banners. They had fun figuring different designs out while Steve watched the rugby again!

Been quite foggy out today, as well as rainy. I’m amazed there’s any snow left…

I emerged at some point to find another couple of neighbours chatting with Steve, they live a little way down the road opposite our house, and told Steve of some good walking routes around the area, one of which which I might have to put my trainers and running gear on to investigate next weekend.

The evening was spent getting serially distracted while supposedly making cheese and broccoli soup. I got it into my head that I absolutely had to make something with my sourdough culture that was now quite happily bubbly, and I wanted cake. But between the various distractions I ended up trying to do everything all at the same time so it was an absolute miracle when both the soup AND the cake turned out alright!!

While Steve was cooking the chicken pieces for the kids’ tea I was watching Big Hero 6 with Erika and oh my word gahhhh these onion ninjas attacked me just like they do every time I watch that movie…

Speaking of onion ninjas it’s also Shark week and I had reached today’s sensory saturation point by bedtime which sucked a bit. Incredibly the boys were still in “be lovely to mummy it’s mothers’ day” mode and got ready for bed with minimal fuss (maybe yummy chocolate cake for supper helped?!) and we had some proper snuggly cuddles. When Charley got into bed though he suddenly got all sad, turns out he’d just remembered he wanted to give me a sunflower for mothers’ day and was sad that he hadn’t been able to do the thing he’d wanted to do! So we’re planning to sow sunflower seeds in April, and I’ve promised him we’ll make sunflowers tomorrow. Need to get my thinking cap on and figure out where all the craft bits are (and where to put them so they’re semi-accessible) so I can make good on that promise tomorrow.

It’s been one of THE nicest mothers’ days. All day.

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You were warned 😉

Any readers able to identify woodland animals just by their droppings I’ll be impressed 😂