Killeen Daily Herald
Maria Luisa Sanbria held back tears as she announced some big news.
Her grandson just called her from Houston, to tell her he was making Spanish food for her their family’s annual Mother’s Day get together.
Sanbria was one of the models participating in the Mother’s Day Fashion Show at the Lion’s Club Senior Center on Friday afternoon. Featuring designer clothes on loan from Dillard’s, the event also celebrated the third anniversary of the opening of the senior center.
Eleven models took to the runway, showing off everything from handbags to resort wear to evening dresses.
The parade of fashions even impressed Dillard’s sales manager Jennifer Lauer, who helped coordinate the fashion show. “They look like real models.”
Mothers and motherhood were the topics of conversation, as the group dined on homemade punch and a wide assortment of cakes. Sandra Fico Sibray-Cook, also one of models, brought her own homemade cakes, decorated with mother-daughter-themed trinkets.
The women of Killeen’s Red Hat Society attended, each one of them mothers and grandmothers themselves.
Olga Cain, of Harker Heights, said her Mother’s Day was special because mothers are usually the ones who wait on everyone else. “They deserve to waited on for a change,” said the mother of three.
Sandra Browne has four children and five grandchildren. She called motherhood simply “A way of life.”
For Suellen McCall, it’s a special day knowing that four generations of mothers and daughters in her family celebrate together. Her own mother is 90. She said spending Mother’s Day with her is “a blessing from God.”
Mother and daughter piano team Ann and Mary Connors provided the music for the event.
Sanbria said for her the day has always meant more, having lost her own mother when she was a young girl. The mother of two and grandmother of four, said now the bond she has with her daughter is even more profound, because she is now a mother herself.
For this Mother’s Day, she recorded the emotions for her daughter. “I just wrote her a letter. It said ‘I love you from my heart.'”