At my house, I find it helpful to remind everybody exactly why we celebrate Mother’s Day with big expensive gifts and lots of fanfare.

And less any of you mothers or fathers forgot what bringing a child into the world entailed, I made a list of the top five highlights of the birthing experience that Hallmark forgets to mention:

1. Pregnancy is not nine months long, it is 38 to 42 weeks long which really equals 9½ to 10½ months–11 months if the baby is two weeks late. To put it in perspective, that’s the same difference in time as celebrating New Year’s Eve a little late, like over Thanksgiving Weekend—and those last weeks of pregnancy drag on longer than the holiday shopping season.
2. Sitting in a booth in a restaurant is not possible. This wouldn’t be so bad if pregnancy cravings didn’t include things like Nachos Bel Grande or dollar cheeseburgers and free refills on drinks…
3. …which leads us to knowing the location of every bathroom within 50 feet, no matter how clean it is or even if it’s just a Port-a-John in someone’s front yard and we need to break into it because we always, ALWAYS had to go, everywhere, all the time (even if we didn’t always fit through the stall doors). Remember being so constipated that when it was finally time to go, nothing else on the face of the planet mattered?
4. The memory of labor pains fades, but most women can tell you precisely how often they shaved their legs in anticipation of prenatal visits–and later labor and the parade of people who would come to check exactly how dilated their cervixes were. There have been smaller audiences at PTA meetings.
5. And let’s not forget the sitz baths and why we needed them

Feel free to photocopy and post this list.  Personally, I have found it useful to laminate and distribute copies as well.  Mother’s Day comes only once a year, and you wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.