Mickey was a nice, cheerful, optimistic boy. No one could remember ever having seen him ______; it seemed he didn’t ______ whatever people said to him. Even his teachers admired his good ______. It was so unusual that a story was going around that Mickey’s ______ must be due to some special secret. They asked Mickey so much that he ______ his favorite teacher, Mr. Anthony, to tea one afternoon. When they had finished, Mickey ______ Mr. Anthony around the house. When Mickey opened his bedroom door, the teacher ______. The huge wall was a unique collage (拼贴画) of thousands of colors and shapes! It was the loveliest decoration Mr. Anthony had ever ______.

“Some people at school think that I ______ think badly of anyone,” Mickey started to explain, “and that ______ at all bothers me, but that’s not true at all. I’m just like anyone else. I used to get angrier than all the other kids.______ years ago, with the help of my parents, I started a small collage. With every little piece I stuck on I added some bad thought or act.”

It was ______. The teacher looked closely at die wall. In each one of the small ______ he could read “fool”, “silly”, “idiot”, “pain”, and a thousand other ______ things.

“This is how I started ______ all my bad times into an opportunity to ______ to my collage. Now I like the collage so much that, each lime someone makes me angry, I couldn’t be ______. They’ve given me a new piece for my work of ______.”

That day, the teacher was impressed by Mickey’s ______ to have an optimistic character. Without telling anyone, Mr. Anthony ______ his own collage and he would often recommend it to his students.

It was my twenty-eighth birthday, and I was seriously upset. I was a newly divorced mom, raising two small children on my own. Feeling _______ myself had become comfortable for me.

The evening before my _______, my six-year-old son Nick said,“Tomorrow's your birthday, Mommy! I can't _______!”Unable to return his enthusiasm, I kissed his cheeks and _______ he could forget it the next day.

The next morning, I _______ noises in our living room and then I heard Nick _______ his baby sister Maya, telling her to“make Mommy smile today.”It suddenly hit me. I'd been so _______ in my sadness that I hadn't realized how it was affecting my children. Sensing my _______, my little boy was doing his best to _______ something about it.

I marched into the living room to hug my children — and was __________ in my tracks. There sat Nick on the floor, Maya on her blanket next to him, and in front of them was a pile of __________.

I looked wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the presents, then back to my son. “Happy Birthday!” he cried. “I __________ you, Mommy, didn't I?” I knelt (跪) down next to him and asked how he'd __________ to get me the presents. He reminded me of our __________ to the Dollar Tree store, and I __________ remembered him telling me he was going to spend the pocket money he'd been saving for ages. I had almost __________ him for spending everything he had so carefully saved. I would never have imagined that he was __________ gifts for me.

__________ the presents, I suddenly saw the beauty in my life. The sadness __________ from my heart. I hugged my son and daughter and told them how __________ I was to have them in my life.