Shower in a Box...The Beginning

Around December 18th the UPS man was about to declare a mutiny when 6 large crates were delivered to our house in Lawton, OK. Every box was marked with "Do not open until further instructions". (For any who are curious, the photo of the boxes here is from Mom and Dad's house - not mine - apparently Mom needed some wine after packing it all up!) Of course my mother is an expert at "projects" and great ideas, so I could only guess at what was before us. Mom had given strict instructions, and told us that we would receive more information "when it was time". With this in mind we had NO IDEA how long these boxes would be in the house and Ben's response was "Tell your Mom she needs to quit shipping us so much stuff or find us a bigger house." As a good daughter I quietly stacked the boxes in the baby room and didn't nag her about them again until a few days before Christmas - when I was told I would get more instructions "soon".



Fast forward to Christmas Day. Ben was out checking on our boat because of the big Oklahoma snow storm and I was cooking up some appetizers for the afternoon - Mom called to ask if I "had a few minutes to talk". I said sure but when she discovered Ben and his Dad were gone, she said I had to call back when they were home. We did that and she told Ben to find box #1 and to have Gayle get the video camera ready. Below I have uploaded the video of what happened next...I have clipped it a bit - the original was almost 17 minutes and had some "where is this" and "what are my instructions" stuff that I cut out for time...



As you can tell - and imagine - I was VERY surprised. Never in my wildest dreams was this what these packages held. Who would have come up with this? My mother of course.

Here is an excerptt of the instructions that were with the numbered box: "Dear Mandy and Ben, Well, now the secret is out...if we couldn't bring you and your friends and family HERE for a shower, we decided to bring the shower to YOU! So, now that you've read the invitation it's time for the fun to begin! Each little box has a numbered tag in it which corresponds to a gift tagged with the same number. Your friends were so generous! More than 25 people responded and so, in some cases I had to "double up" in the boxes!...I had originally planned on having you start this on January 1, but since Gayle has been in on it with me from the start, I wanted you to start this while they are with you. So, each day, after Day 1 you get to open the next day's packages..but ONLY that day's! No cheating!...We love you so much, and from the response to this little 'project', it's obvious that you have many loving friends and family members. We wish we could be with yo, but with every minute spend putting this together, we both added our love, I hope the shower of gifts feels like a shower of everyone's love. May God bless all three of you. Love, Mom and Dad."

Well, if you want to make a pregnant lady cry, just write her something like that. I am sure you can tell from the video that Ben and I were both absolutely overwhelmed by this amazing gift. We have been able to open 4 days worth of gifts so far and each day we are overwhelmed again by the love and generosity of our friends and family.
I was of course disappointed when we realized that going home for a "family" shower would not be in the cards for us - but chalked it up to another thing about Army life. To see now how supportive all of our family and friends are and to have them so generous as to give us a "shower" long distance makes both Ben and I realize how truly lucky we are to have all of them in our lives. And of course how could you ever thank a Mom like mine who comes up with this amazing idea to welcome her first grandchild into the world and prove yet again that she would do anything to make her own little girl smile.