Smorga-what-a?

Mother's Day makes people feel weird.

I say that because I just know so many people are hurting and this day adds to that hurt. My heart is sad for those who are longing to be a mother but have been unable to conceive, for those who have lost a child, and for those who have lost their mother, or who have not had any sort of mother at all.

My children are still quite young, so this is the first year that they were excited to give me something.  The boys both did special projects at school, and a special project at Lowe's with my dad, who also took them to the store to get me cards and some other goodies.  When they brought the bags in the house, they insisted that I not look and hid the stuff under their beds. They were so cute...but I wondered...if I didn't encourage them to fill out the cards...would the cards even get filled out?

Yesterday when we got home for church, the boys were in their bedroom.  I looked in on them and surprised them and they told me not to look!  They were filling out the cards. :-) The looks of excitement and joy on their faces was priceless.  So cute and so simple and so perfect to receive such genuine love and effort from my children.  The goodies they picked out included Reese's Cups (which they allowed me to eat allllll by myself!), sour candy and chips. :-)

Instead of expecting a big stink about me on Mother's (ha), I decided to throw a tea party for my mom, aunt and grandma...without tea. Lame, no tea, I know...but my family knows my home is a bring-your-own-caffeinated beverage home.  :-)  I do have a coffee maker, though, that mostly gets used when my mom makes coffee!

Nick took the kids to the car wash and to the park so that us ladies could talk in quiet.  That was very nice.

We used my Grandma O.'s really pretty dishes.

And the star of the meal was the smorgastarta (there should be some dots and circles above some of those letters).  The smorga-what-a?  :-P  It is a Swedish sandwich cake, although I don't think my sandwich fillings were very sweedish.

It was super fun to decorate!  I felt like my Grandma Kay because she always adorned food with garnishes and such.

I made bread dough in my bread machine and baked it in a round cake pan.  I then cut the bread into three layers.

Filling for layer one was a spinach/cheese mixture and filling for layer two was ham salad.  The frosting was made with cream cheese and sour cream, white pepper, dill and garlic.

The cake and my pretty momma.

I also served cheesecake stuffed strawberries, cream of asparagus soup, blueberry dump cake and lemonade. Yum!  Mom served the coffee. :-P

This recipe was quite difficult. ;-)

It is really a blessing to get your eyes off of yourself and to do something with others' in mind. I love you, Mom, Grandma and Aunt Elaine!