Constable: For Mom's Day, she finally got her third son's handprints and footprints. He's 23.

I've never been a good Mother's Day gift-giver. It's not that I'm cheap or lazy, although I certainly have my cheap and lazy moments. I'm willing to give a time-consuming or expensive gift if I can think of an appropriate one. But Mother's Day has always proved extra difficult for me.

What do you give a mom? Gee, thanks for carrying me for nine months, enduring an extremely painful labor and birth, feeding me and keeping me alive for years, teaching me about life, loving me unconditionally, helping with everything and being such a huge part of my life. Here's a necklace made out of macaroni and plastic straws, or a bouquet of flowers, or maybe a planter, or comfy slippers you mentioned once, or a scarf that matches nothing, or a brunch (my treat).

The worst Mother's Day gift I gave my mom probably was when I was in high school. I got her a bottle of Chantilly by Houbigant, the perfume of choice worn by my 16-year-old girlfriend, Last I checked, that bottle was still in a bathroom cabinet.

I don't think I've totally bombed with a gift to my wife, Cheryl, the mother of our three sons. But I have fallen into a rut.

Every Mother's Day, I fill a large flower pot for our front-porch stairs with annual flowers. The plants vary slightly from year to year, but every display features a thriller (something tall and showy), a filler (some more mundane plant that takes up space) and a spiller (any plant that trails over the side of the planter). She likes it, but it's so predictable, and it's more of a gift for our house than for her.

The only Mother's Day gift where I nailed it was in 1996, Cheryl's first year as a mother.

Our twins were 5 months old, and I thought it would be cool to give my wife a framed version of their little handprints and footprints. Even then, I couldn't have done it without the help of my artist sister-in-law, Karen, who masterminded the effort that resulted in squirming Ross and Ben dipping their hands and feet in paint and making the framed imprints my wife hung above our bed.

I wanted to do that for Mother's Day 1999, but our third son was just a few weeks old, and taking care of a newborn and 3-year-old twin toddlers left no time to plan a thoughtful Mother's Day gift. I think that year, my gift to my wife was a 40-minute nap.

The moment for Will's prints of his infant hands and feet was lost forever, washed away by the flood of typical parental duties.

I've always felt guilty about that.

So this Mother's Day, I tried to make it up to Cheryl. Turns out that it is much, much easier to do a kid's prints in acrylic paint when the kid is 23 years old.

I bought everything I needed from a helpful clerk at Blick Art Materials in Schaumburg. While Cheryl was marching in an abortion rights protest, Will and I sat on the kitchen floor as he neatly covered his right hand in green paint and his left hand in orange paint. The feet (right foot red and left foot blue) were a bit trickier but produced the desired results.

While Ross and Ben's baby prints fit in a compact frame, we needed a much larger display to contain Will's hands and feet.

Mother's Day arrived with the usual planter, a nice homemade brunch, a Zoom call from Ross and Ben, a beautiful letter delivered in person by Will, and the surprise presentation of the prints a couple of decades late.

Cheryl loves it. And while I realize Mother's Day is not about me, I feel gratified with having come through with a Mother's Day gift that she'll remember.

Of course, that makes next year even trickier, so I've got to start working on it now. This might sound better in my head than in reality, but I'm thinking she'd have to be impressed receiving an unopened, vintage bottle of Chantilly by Houbigant.