Sunday, March 3

Up around 7 a.m., but skipped my exercises again, because I needed shower and dress and begin preparations for lunch right away. The first thing I did was cook lemon pudding to use on the lemon cake later. While the pudding cooled, we had breakfast.

Then I put chicken in the slow cooker. Daughter and the kids woke up around 8:30 and had a breakfast of juice and cereal. Then they occupied themselves, while I did other things for lunch.

Son, Daughter-in-Law, and three great-children arrived around 10:30. Hubbie had accompanied Mother to our house by this time, and she resumed her jigsaw puzzle. Great-Grandson helped.

Daughter, and Daughter-in-Law helped in the kitchen, and shortly after noon everything was ready. Besides the chicken, the meal included rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese (mainly for the kids), corn-on-the-cob, green beans, and Sis's homemade bread. Dessert, of course, was the lemon cake spread with lemon pudding and meringue, and chocolate cupcake.

Funny: the kids thought there should be candles on the cake, but I forgot about buying number candles for it. So I searched a drawer for the numbers 9 and 1, thinking those numbers surely must be there, leftover from birthday parties for our now deceased shih tzu dog. But there was no number 9, so Hubbie suggested we use the numbers 5, 4, and 1, which add up to 91. This inspired jokes about Mother being 541 years old, or if read from the opposite side, 145. I took a picture of the cake and candles to post on my social network page, and Mother suggested I add "do the math" to the photo, which I did.

After Mother blew out the candles, she opened gifts. She got a gift card to her favorite department store from Son and Daughter-in-Law, and five new jigsaw puzzles from me. She was anxious to open and begin one right after we enjoyed dessert.

Daughter and the three kids needed to go home right after lunch, so they left around 1 p.m. Son, Daughter-in-Law, and the other three kids stayed to visit until around 3 p.m., then they headed home, too.

Mother stayed at our house until after supper. For supper, she and Hubbie had hot dogs and chips, and I had a chicken salad sandwich and chips. Afterward, Hubbie accompanied her to her house, and then he and I watched TV, including the 2003 movie, "Beyond Borders." Angelina Jolie, stars as a wealthy married woman, who meets and falls in love with a renegade doctor (Clive Owen) in war-torn Africa. Their love seems doomed, but she follows him to one world hot spot after another, leaving her family periodically to do so.

Followed that with the 2011 movie, "The Descendants," starring George Clooney. A woman is bedridden and comatose after a boating accident, and her husband, a Hawaiian land-baron, is inept at handling his two daughters. As his wife's condition deteriorates, he learns things about her, and about himself.