The Fed-Ex lady just dropped off a gorgeous bouquet of flowers – a Mother’s Day gift from our son’s birth mom. Jen has been asking me for the past two weeks if we can get together on Mother’s Day to have lunch. My niece is graduating from college Sunday and I’ll be attending that her graduation, so Jen and I made plans to ‘do’ lunch someday soon, instead.

Jen is a very thoughtful person – she’s always sending cards and making sure that everyone feels cared for. At one point, she seriously considered buying a Hallmark shop because she had invested so much money in greeting cards! She loves to throw parties and she’s into scrapbooking.

I, on the other hand, tend to forget holidays and or I ignore them on the principle that most holidays were invented by the greeting card companies to part us from our hard-earned money. While I have good intentions to ‘scrapbook’, baseball, basketball, cross country and school activities seem to always take precedence. I haven’t inserted a photo into an album since our youngest son was a year old (that was nine years ago). And I detest parties – I hate planning them and I especially hate attending them. I am the original party pooper!

Next weekend, Jen is hosting a “Royal Celebration” for her “Princess” daughter who’s turning four. Last night, our (mutual) son, Ben, and I visited Toys R Us in search of the perfect gift for Miss Princess. Since we are a boys-only household, Ben and I had absolutely no idea what to get for a 4-year-old girl. We put in an emergency call to Jen.

“What does she want for her birthday?”

Jen’s not-so-helpful answer: “She’s a princess.”

“Okay, but what, exactly, does that mean?”

“She likes to play dress-up (princess costumes, of course) and read books about princesses and play pretend with her princess dolls.”

“Oh, I get it now.”

We headed to the pink aisle (a place we’d rarely visited) and began looking for “princess-y” things. Following Jen’s detailed prompting, we selected a “Leapster” game that seems very girly. “She’ll love it,” Jen announced.

Our family will head over to their “castle” next weekend, where Ben will play the role of big brother Prince Charming, entertaining all the toddlers and preschoolers with his antics and pushing them on the swingset for hours. Ben is much more like his birth mother in that he is a party kind of guy.

It’s been quite a privilege to be part of this ever-growing, ever-changing relationship with Jen over the past almost 14 years. We’ve pretty much adopted Jen, her husband, and their two little girls into our extended family, and they’ve adopted us into theirs.

We try to celebrate Mother’s Day (or a day somewhere in the vicinity of Mother’s Day) together every year. When the flowers arrived today, I felt a momentary pang of guilt. “I should be the one sending her flowers,” I chastised myself. After all, she’s the one who handed over this really cool kid for us to raise.

But I don’t feel too much guilt because Jen is family, and I know she accepts my anti-holiday persona with grace and loves me despite my faults. That’s true family. Happy Mother’s Day, Jen! We love you!