Plan A Mother’s Day Weekend

The Mom Weekly Volume 143: May 5, 2026 

You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here. https://themomweekly.com/

Notes: 

Many of you know I’ve been sharing points & miles content on LinkedIn on weekdays since the beginning of the year. And I do plan to start an email list to share some of this content, but I haven’t gotten to that yet. It’s underway!

In the meantime, I’m going to share a recent post. (Not points & miles related, sorry).

Occasionally on LinkedIn, I will repost someone else’s post, and add my own take to it.

This is my reply to a dad’s post reminding other dads to remember Mother’s Day and to plan accordingly—get your cards in advance, order flowers, etc. I took this up a notch, and I really enjoyed what I wrote. I think it would be helpful not just for Mother’s Day (I don’t need anything, really! I would just enjoy a phone call time with each of the kids), but for when you have kids of your own. And I also think it is a helpful framework for really any holiday.

Since Dad’s birthday falls right around Mother’s Day each year, we are often doing this process together. But give it a try with your next 

Plan A Mother’s Day Weekend (LinkedIn Repost)

I liked so much of this dad-to-dad reminder about Mother’s Day next weekend. 

But also, I hope dads will take sound advice from an older mom who’s had decades of Mother’s Days:

—Plan a Mother’s Day Weekend—

I love Laura Vanderkam’s framework for looking at the weekend as seven distinct periods. With that, the weekend seems much more expansive:

Friday night

Saturday morning

Saturday afternoon

Saturday evening

Sunday morning

Sunday afternoon

Sunday evening

But we don’t want to give Mom another job by having her plan the whole weekend, do we? So: I suggest you propose one and have her fine-tune it with what she’d like best.

With a Mother’s Day weekend, you could offer something like this:

Friday night: 

Pizza & movie night with kids

Dad & kids order/pickup pizza, serve, and clean up

Mom picks movie

Dad takes care of bedtime while Mom reads, enjoys time alone

Saturday morning:

Mom goes out for a walk/coffee with friends

Dad, obvi, on kid duty

Saturday afternoon: 

Family lunch out (Mom choice) and Family hike 

Mom gets post-hike nap, Dad takes care of the kids 

Saturday evening:

Casual (or fancy) date night dinner

Dad arranges babysitting, suggests three places for Mom to choose from 

Sunday morning:

Church, Mom’s choice of time

Sunday afternoon:

Brunch/lunch with extended family, perhaps takeout (restaurants are so full on Mother’s Day itself, we rarely eat out then).

Later: Mom time alone, ideally with chocolate and a good book

Sunday evening: 

Simple supper cooked by Dad  and kids

Special dessert, cards, and “presents” for Mom

Obviously, your wife’s preferences would differ from my sample weekend (mine differ from the sample!). 

But the genius move is offering a plan of thoughtful ideas and letting her edit it to what she likes.

Consider presenting your wife a proposed Mother’s Day weekend plan the next day or so, and letting her have the fun of personalizing it. By planning ahead, your whole family can enjoy a great Mother’s Day weekend.

Action Item: Plan A Weekend in the Future

With the framework I talked about above, consider planning a future weekend. I promise this is a fun exercise, and I think you’ll enjoy both the planning process and the weekend.

Interesting/Notable

Rise of the Blood Populist: The Atlantic Gift Article

This is such an important article. An important quote from it:

Over the years, many experts have warned me that periods of entrenched political violence are difficult to escape. We know exactly what conditions make a society ever more vulnerable to political violence, and we’re swimming in them now: highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in civic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it.