After spending too much time playing with his favorite toy, Billy and his mother are very late for nursery school and his mother forgets some crucial things as she rushes to work.
When fourth grader Collette sees her own mother take over the job of teaching her class, life becomes more embarrassing and chaotic than she can stand.
Annabel thinks her mom has the best life. If she were a grown-up, she could do whatever she wanted! Then one morning she wakes up to find she's turned into her mother . . . and she soon discovers it's not as easy as it looks!
When her father dies, ten-year-old Rebecca is sent to live with the mother she's been brought up to believe had abandoned her and, through a growing relationship with a troubled foster child, begins to accept her mother and some of the truths her father had always kept from her.
Young children describe the various things their hands and their mothers' hands do when they are together throughout the different seasons of the year.