My mom has good reason to be nervous on Mother's Day. That's because probably 75% of the Mother's Day gifts she has received from her children have been the types of gifts that few other moms receive. I've heard that many children give their mothers things like flowers, money, chocolates and jewelry. My mom was much luckier.There was the series of two or three years where Brian, Sarah and I made videos for her. We'd get out the video camera and put together something hillarious. There was that one time when we reenacted on video footage of our births. (Of course there was no such thing as home video cameras when I was born, but that's another story...) The images of us prentending to be my mom giving birth to our cat, Ranger, who bit the dust this past winter, still haunt all who saw them. There's the video we made of our parents' wedding where I wore one of Dad's sport coats and held a mop with a veil on it while Brian married us. I think he said something like "in hickness and sealth as long as you both shall live," if I remember correctly. We put together some elaborate set-ups where I pretended to be the host of a tv show and sat next to our tv where we had another video playing that we had made. It was pretty high tech for a bunch of elementary school kids. I just remember that we always made Mom cry when we gave these videos to her. I think the tears came from laughing so hard, but they probably were also the result of thoughts like "why did my kids turn out this way?"
There were also the times where our Mother's Day gifts came from shopping sprees at Big Lots or the Dollar General. We would usually load up and go to the dollar store in the worst area of town where the items were sure to be the junkiest and load her up with an assortment of strange items. One year we gave her a huge gift basket with probably 25 individually wrapped items such as a strange looking jar of peas and carrots, a cake mix printed in German, a video of firey car crashes, wrestling figurine toys, and a huge dented can of fruit cocktail. We also got her a plastic chicken (named _________, the chicken of love and happiness--does anybody remember her name?) that she embarrased us with by putting plastic flowers in it and putting it on our front porch.
Cheryl Moles. What a lucky woman.
5 comments:
Why did Ava keep disappearing from the front porch?
Last year we had lunch at Jade Garden and you gave Dad and I the nice lawn furniture. It just wasn't as memorable, I guess!
Love you.
That's right-- "Ava: The Chicken of Love and Happiness"
What another great memory for your Mom! I can only hope my kids are as creative and thoughtful (and have as much fun coming up with ideas!)as you all seemed to!!
Thanks for sharing,
Jean
Wow! What nice gifts. My Jeff always said "Sorry it's late, it's coming, it's in the mail". Those mother's day gifts are still out there, somewhere, in the mail.
you can't forget when i dressed up as grandma bennett and had cotton balls for hair and a picture of mom's cousin that we thought was her. i think that was the video that really changed the way we all view mothers day forever.
and her name was EVA, the chicken of love and happiness. or peace, love and hamony as i would say.
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