Saturday Gift Post--Two Weeks Before Mother's Day and It's Raining. Discuss.

I can't believe it's two weeks (brain freeze--I don't know why I said one!) before Mother's Day. We increased our assortment of cards again this year, or at least I think we did. 32 seems like a lot of designs--that's 192 cards. I guess that's not really much at all. Sadly it all happens in the course of one week, so there's not much time to reorder. Here are a few of my favorite new designs. Yes, one of them features snakes. The greeting is "thanks for all the hugs."

Here's the rule of thumb on Mother's Day card selection. Shop this weekend and the selction is great. Shop next weekend and the selection is terrible. It's your choice.

I can finally invoke the rhyme, "April showers bring May flowers", and with that truism in mind, here is our spring assortment of our kids' umbrellas. We've got a fish, frog, bee, ladybug, and monkey. They are pretty cute, but remember, these at only $9.95, (the sock monkey is slightly higher), don't expect them to stand up to strong winds. I thought my far more expensive umbrella was going to break getting to Boswell this morning.

If things get really wet, you can have an impromptu bath in one of the large puddles that could collect outside. May I suggest something from our rubber duck collection? For those outsized personalities, we have a giant rubber duck which has been turning heads all week. For the bookish environmental sort, we have a particularly eco-friendly reading duck. And for travelers, we have rubber duck luggage tags. For travelers in the dark, we also have rubber duck key chain lights.

I thought that there'd be rubber duck books to accompany the display coming out of the woodwork, but aside from Eric Carle's Ten Rubber Ducks, the pickings are slim. And We also have several adult titles, most of which caution you against buying too many rubber ducks. At least when someone came in looking for Moby Duck this week, we knew where it was.