Today was for Sam.

He's on school holidays for three weeks ... year-round schooling here, so it's shorter breaks more often instead of a straight three months once a year ... and he's been SO good and helpful.

A couple of days on the beach at Grandma's with his cousin Emilie had him pretty well pooped and needing some R&R at home last week, but too much of the time he's been patiently waiting for me to stop working, shut down the computer and spend some quality time with him ... oh, and get his baby sister away from a carefully-crafted migration or precise artwork.

I collected my research ... trawling for blog fodder ... as I could early this morning, then at about nine o'clock we headed to town. Although we have more books at our house, Sam wanted to go to the 'liberry' so he could 'buy some books, then take them back'. A roaring success, he came home with three books he's actually not seen before.

Now in the same building, the History Museum was our second stop. Not as interesting to a kid wild about animals as the Natural History Museum, Sam was impressed enough with the sailing ships and miniature renditions of traditional Seychelles houses, but the gri-gri collection, my favorite with representations from the local flavor of voodoo, went right over his head.

The WWI German machine gun got more than a glance, though, and he was impressed with the cannonball collection, as the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies are a big hit in our house. (And he doesn't find them scary in the least. Strange kid.)

We finished off the morning by putting a cherry on top, literally ... we went out for a lunch consisting completely of ice cream.

Now, back in my younger days when my older kids were younger too, I did set aside time for special kid-focused days, but I know it never would have occurred to me to do ice cream for lunch. That idea became part of the kind of mom I am only a couple of years ago.

A dear friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, she was a divorced mother of two boys, aged 8 and 6. She had no illusions of what the time ahead was going to bring to them, and debated long and hard how to bring them into the circle of people in the know, to include them in what had suddenly become her world, and to do this in a way that they would remember, but not in a totally negative way. After all, this was a moment likely to stick in her boys' memories and she was already working toward leaving them with recollections she could live with them living with.

So, she took them out to an ice cream breakfast and broke the news to them over hot fudge and whipped cream.

She died a couple of years later.

When we adopted Sam and Cj and I became a mom again ... giving me a second chance at parenting ... I decided early on that special days would include sweet ice cream meals in nice restaurants, leaving sticky fingerprints and memories of a good day out.