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My mom is a special mom because she is one of a kind there are many out there that  seem to be just like her but she is one of a kind..... Why because she is my mom her name is Louise Jones and today is her birthday. this may have been posted late but it is still the 15th  so I have written this special note to her, and to share with all of you.

MY MISSION:  FILL TWO SHOE BOXES

My church participates in Operation Christmas Child.  We fill shoe boxes with toys for children in the developing world.  This year I decided to fill one shoe box for a boy aged 2-4 and one for a girl aged 5-9.  On Sunday, after the special service praying over and blessing the shoe boxes of non-procrastinating participants, I figured I could fill my shoe boxes and get them to the church on Monday morning, muttering a prayer of blessing over them myself.  Since my children and I were already in Wal-Mart on Sunday, I thought grabbing shoe-box fillin's would be no problem.

Was. Not. Going. To. Happen.

My children, you see, believe that they are the most deprived children in the world, and will not let me shop for anybody else's children.  Or for myself.  Or for much of anything except electronic games the size of postage stamps which cost $40 and get lost the same day.  My fourteen-year-old daughter had just watched several episodes of MTV Teen Cribs and decided that anybody who doesn't live in a $20 million house that looks like a resort hotel is underprivileged.

So while I was looking at little cars for my Christmas Child, Boy (2-4), my children were shoving everything from Lego Sets to fuzzy lamps under my nose and begging for them at top volume.  I bought one blue car, under duress ("I bet you never bought ME a blue car that nice when I was a baby!")  And gave up.

On Monday morning, an hour and a half into my Operation Christmas Child shopping trip, I realized I am way too anal-retentive to shop for tiny strangers in foreign lands, even if my children are in school and out of the way. 

CHRISTMAS CHILD, MALE, AGED 2-4

My little Operation Christmas Child boy will be 2-4 years old.  That's quite an age range.  Would he be two and put the toys in his mouth?  Would they pose a choking hazard?  Would he be four and think stacking cups were stupid?  Would he eat the crayons?  Stick the pencils in his eyes?  Would he be African and need a different kind of brush or comb?  What if the soap stung his eyes?  Liquid baby soaps were prohibited, so I got him:

• Soft chewable Tonka car with moveable non-detatchable wheels labelled safe for children over 20 months
• Aveeno oatmeal soap (won't sting)
• Nice washcloth (the cheap one looked like it might unravel)
• 3-pack of Hanes T-shirts, sized 2-4T (big enough?)
• Candy (what if he's starving?  Wouldn't a baggie of pinto beans make more sense than candy?  If all the other kids' boxes have candy his day will be ruined though.  Candy.)
• Stackable cups (technically a baby toy; if he's four, he can eat and drink out of 'em)
• Four-pack of Colgate Wisp toothbrushes with built-in dentifrice (least confusing/messy/edible)
• Stuffed salamander with no parts to chew off (too scary?)
• Stuffed dog (ditto, but ears somewhat worrisome)
• Wooden number/letter blocks (crap, made in China, but small enough to fit in box but too big for mouth)
• Large rubber ball (couldn't find one, got one for a dog, smelled highly toxic, wouldn't even give it to a dog, got smaller one out of bubblegum machine)

One shoe box down, one to go.

CHRISTMAS CHILD, FEMALE, AGED 5-9

My little Operation Christmas Child girl will be 5-9 years old.  Now that's what I'm talkin' about.

I almost got her a pink fleece blanket with stars but the shoe box was too small.  Will she be cold at night with no blanket?  Why doesn't the dollar store have a mosquito net?  That might fit in the box.  What good are school supplies if she's dead of malaria in a month? 

Here is what I stuffed in her box:

• Twist-up Crayola Crayons (the normal kind might break)
• Writing tablet
• Sharpened pencils and a sharpener (pre-sharpened them because sharpener might not work)
• Yardley of London lavender soap (kid needs a little luxury, yes?)
• Bright, shiny, funky head scarf (okay, so this was a splurge.  Hope her mother/big sister doesn't swipe and/or sell it)
• Purple washcloth (matches the soap)
• Pink travel toothbrush and Colgate (to where, on earth, do I think she is travelling?  oh well, it looked cool)
• Set of bright bracelets with stars
• Two dolls, one small clown with a china face and one big soft cloth one.  No plastic.
• About 200 itsy-bitsy ponytail holders, suitable for any little girl of any race
• Hairbrush
• "Worry dolls" in a wooden box from Chinaberry in Charlottesville (happened to have some on hand; will Samaritan's Purse think they are idolatrous voodoo gear and throw them away? I hope not.)
• Large rubber ball from same bubblegum machine
• Even more candy than the little boy got

After all, little girls in the developing world have a lot of catching up to do.

So into my church fellowship hall I skulk, at the very last possible shoe-box second, and lay the boxes on a table with the $14 check, $7 per box.  God, bless these belated overstuffed shoe boxes that I've fretted over for two hours, and may they bless some little kids somewhere on earth and make their Christmas very happy, and do not permit the kids' parents to auction off the contents since I spent so much money, and protect the kids from bullies who would take their Werther's Original butter candy and luxury soaps by force, and help me to get a grip already, amen.

Do we really know our doctors?

I am a driver who is perpetually lost.  I get lost going places I've been to dozens of times; to wit:  last month I got lost en route to my university, from which I drove home on the weekends for four years.

People say, "You know how to get here, right?"

Sheepish silence.

"Well, you've been here, right?"

More sheepish silence.

"Shoedame, you were just here last weekend!"  And they throw up their hands and start talking about landmarks.  Well, do you know where the 50-foot grain silo is?  With the robin's-egg-blue top?  Teenagers spray-painted profane graffiti on it in bright red paint."

No response.

In my defense, if their vehicles were full of my children they wouldn't notice landmarks either.  The Statue of Liberty could be relocated to their neighborhood and they would drive right by without noticing it.  The atmosphere in my minivan is. . .is. . .well, it's like this.  Interruptions are bracketed:

"MOM!  She has my hairbrush in her "[bag MOM!]" will you make them shut "[up I]" don't want to go to the pool, it's "[boring SHE]" still has my hairbrush, make her give it to "[me GET]" your thumb out of your mouth you stupid "[baby YELLOW]" punch buggy no punch "[back! OW!]" MOM! he hit "[me YOU]" said my boyfriend could come over can he come over "[tonight, SHE]" always has people over and I never have anybody over, I've been asking to have Kaitlyn over for a "[month WHY]" do we have to have all these dumb girls over, I want to have boys "[over I'M]" starving can we stop for soda?  Ice cream? "[Chips? I]" wanna make love in this club, in this club, in this clu. . .<click> MOM! why did you turn off the radio?"

Combine this level of distraction with my natural (nonexistent) sense of direction, and you have a family that is rarely where, or when, we are supposed to be.  We've gotten lost in every city, town, and outpost within 200 miles.  For years, I have been allowing an extra 45 minutes to get pretty much anywhere.  I consider this the minimum "getting lost time".  If Columbus had sailed the ocean blue with these five kids he'd have ended up in the Arctic circle.  We'd all be eating whale blubber right now.

So naturally, I've envied people with a GPS device to help them drive where they're supposed to be going.

That is, I envied them until I borrowed these devices and tried to use them.  You might think that with the noise level in my minivan, I wouldn't even be able to hear a GPS, but I actually can.  I can hold a GPS in my lap and turn it up to so many decibels that the polite, firm, schoolteacherish voice is louder than five kids and the radio.  So that's not a difficulty.  However, any GPS is a) hell bent on killing us all or b) gets us even more lost, if possible, than my sorry sense of direction.

I've concluded that the difference between having a GPS and not having one is that you get lost strangling a computer, or get lost not strangling a computer.

My mother's GPS directs me to turn into brick walls, cow pastures, and creeks with amazing accuracy.  It also proclaims that "you are now arriving at your destination" when nowhere within ten miles of the place.  "Turn left," it says.  "You are now arriving at your destination."  You look to the left at a ten-foot pile of mulch and ungraciously lose your temper.  Her GPS takes you to the correct street in a city and then demurs at directing you to the actual street number, which might be 25 blocks away.  Maybe Mom's GPS thinks that would be cheating; making it a little too easy for me.  Famously, Mom's GPS once announced that I had arrived to pick my son up from a college class at the Zippy Clean Car Wash. 

My boyfriend's GPS sounds like Mary Tyler Moore on crystal meth and is also possessed by the devil, or at least one of hell's lower-ranking imps.  It exclaims, in the middle of four-lane highways without so much as a shoulder, "turn right, then turn left.  Recalculating." He calls his GPS by a name I can't repeat and says, "You'd better recalculate, because I can't turn right or left."  His GPS is also confounded by exit and entrance ramps.  Get on a ramp and it freaks completely and the whole system resets.  These are ramps that the GPS actually picks out and directs him onto, and then thinks better of it.

My uncle Bob tells a story of being sent up a mountain road by his homicidal GPS which, due to a rock slide, had only one lane.  He was nearly run off the mountainside by a school bus and sought refuge in a ditch.  When he arrived, traumatized, at his destination, the townspeople asked, "you took the mountain road, didn't you?"  They could tell by looking at him.  "Don't ever," the locals intoned, with wagging heads, "take that road."

Computers, even satellite-directed ones, think drivers should take horrible, even potentially deadly, routes.  We poor human suckers are so used to believing whatever computers say that we might abandon paved roads for dirt roads, or cow paths through the woods, if computerized voices told us to.  Uncle Bob's harrowing journey reminds me of people who show up here on the front porch of the Shoe all sweaty and bedraggled and a lovely shade of "MapQuest Green"—their computers directed them to get here from the south by going over Mount Rogers—Virginia's highest elevation, 5,729 feet. This route shaves 20 miles off their journey and adds an hour and a half, the poor things.  In addition to the folly of Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps, our visitors' brand new, very expensive GPS systems often have no sense of road quality versus mileage, and bring them crawling at 20 mph over fifteen miles of unrelenting hairpin curves. Some turkey hunters arrived here by this method and were too exhausted to aim at turkey one; they pleaded to be directed to the nearest hotel and looked relieved when I pointed in the opposite direction of Mt. Rogers.

I'm not saying I've never gotten anywhere using a GPS.  Once, Mom's GPS directed me without a single mishap to the nearest Golden Corral—where I could have an excellent salad and a sliver of steak and admire the 400-lb diners for a mere $15, counting tax and tip, and do the cha-cha in the double-wide bathroom stall.  However, my bad experiences driving with a GPS far outnumber the good.  I have elected not to ask for a GPS for Christmas.  By gum, á la Frank Sinatra, I'll be lost, but much more than this, I'll be lost my way.
 

My laundry pile was just proclaimed "Virginia's 27th Highest Peak" by Governor Kaine.  A stack of dirty clothes and linens so high, I should climb to the top and yodel.

I'm no mathematician, but shouldn't there be less laundry in the summertime, with the children wearing only shorts, tank tops, and sandals?  God help me, our dirty laundry is everywhere.

There's laundry in the bathrooms, in the bedrooms, and behind the living room door.  There's laundry under the sofa and on the front porch and on the back porch. There's laundry in the yard (because of kids stripping off clothes worn over bathing suits to play with the garden hose) and laundry in the van (muddy jackets and blankets from rainy baseball games).

Everything gets dirtier in the summer, and gets dirtier more often.  And not just the clothing, either.  The linens dirtied in summer in this house would try the patience of a saint.  Every hankie and 35 wash cloths are soiled once the paper towels are gone (daily, by noon), and then my resourceful rugrats raid the kitchen drawers for dishrags and cloth napkins.  Don't even get me started on towels--for swimming, for baths and showers, for mopping up spills, for sunbathing.  The children's bedsheets are revolting in warm weather all the time.  Bedding reeks even if I just washed it two days ago.

Even gathering up all the laundry in and around the Shoe is exhausting.  The resulting smelly heap is depressing.  No one woman can possibly wash, dry, fold, and put away this much laundry.  I want to go back to Great-Grandma's two-pairs-of-overalls method, or sign up for Nudism.

Oddly enough, whether I do two, four, or six loads of laundry a day, nobody in this house has any clean underwear during summer break.  Ever.  The underwear situation was the same last summer, so I think terrorists are kidnapping our underwear as soon as school lets out and returning it in August. I'd alert Homeland Security and get them on the case, only no underwear means a tenth of a load a day that I don't have to wash.  I don't mean to sound alarmist, but Laundrageddon is approaching. 

I am spending more on detergent, Oxyclean, Stain Sticks and dryer sheets than I am spending on meat and milk.  Today, June 27, 2009, the laundry pile has reached such a staggering, sticky, stinky height that I really ought to glue it together--unless there's enough mucus and popsicle drippings and watermelon juice to hold it together already--and make a sculpture to donate to a modern art museum.  I would call my masterpiece "Warning:  Fruits of Reproduction." 

Looking at Mt. Laundry, I feel like the last tzar of Russia when the guys with red flags showed up.  I feel like the dude in mythology whose guts got eaten by birds every day and then grew back every night so the birds could eat them again.  Basically, I feel kinda bummed out.  On days like this I walk into the laundry room and think, Oxyclean?  What I need is Oxycontin.

If I were filthy stinking rich, I would simply move out of my houseful of laundry and go buy everyone new wardrobes.  In summertime, I'd change addresses every other week. I'd pay the realtor or somebody to haul the laundry all off to Goodwill:  clean-but-unfolded laundry, dirty unsorted laundry, dirty sorted laundry, wet laundry moldering in the washer, and dry laundry wrinkling in the dryer. Then I would realize that I just donated several sports uniforms to Goodwill which the kids need for games, oh, like, say, tomorrow.

The kids would not be happy.

But their mother, wandering through my new house which is, for a few blissful hours, totally empty of textiles at every stage of the laundry process?  I would be ecstatic.

Then my son would look outside and say, "Hey!  Look!  A hose!" And his little sister would say, "Just a minute; I'm gonna grab a popsicle."
 

I have a 14-year old daughter, size 6, who is convinced she is still a size 2.  This is nothing unusual.  This country is full of women in denial about their actual pants size, who routinely starve and stuff themselves into their former size—pre-pregnancy, pre-Thanksgiving, pre-audition for the lead in the remake of "The Blob."

I could, of course, buy her blue jeans and cut out the labels.  Sometimes I do.

This is not a problem.

However, she has a 12-year-old sister who actually is a size 2.

This, friends, is a problem.

The problem comes in when it is time to hand down clothes from one sibling to another, a must in the cash-strapped Shoe and never a problem with my sons.  Big Bro would toss a shirt at Lil' Bro with a manly air, as if, overnight, he had morphed into Vin Diesel or the Rock, and say in a deep voice, "I have outgrown this.  He can have it."  In fact, I could transfer an outgrown shirt or pair of pants from one boy's drawer into another and the boys, nine times out of ten, never even noticed.

However, here's a newsflash:  girls are different.  Big Sis would die 10,000 painful deaths before admitting that she has gone up a jeans size (or two) and needs to hand down jeans to Lil' Sis.  She might be induced to hand down jeans that are too long, but not a pair that is (gasp!) too tight in the backside.  Most of the time, she even keeps the too-long jeans.  She simply rolls them up to below the knees and continues to squeeze into them, using power tools if necessary.

If I make a mistake and put all of the size 2 jeans in Lil' Sis's drawer, including the old ones that Big Sis is still squeezing into, all hell breaks loose when Lil' Sis, innocently or not, puts her big sister's old jeans on.

And they think they have hostilities in the Gaza Strip.

Once, Big Sis tried to pull her old jeans off her sister by force, with Lil' Sis kicking and screaming, and nearly succeeded.  The fact of her near success getting them off her little sister should have clued in Big Sis that THEY DO NOT FIT HER, seeing as she must put them on by lying on the floor and rolling them on, while holding her breath, and get them off by the same method in reverse, as if peeling a banana.

One morning, I was drinking my coffee when Lil' Sis came tearing into the room screaming bloody murder with Big Sis in hot pursuit.  "SHE HAS ON MY AEROPOSTALES!" Big Sis bellowed.  I jumped between them, but Lil' Sis escaped and shook her behind saucily.  "See, Mom, they fit me," she gloated, and jumped behind me again as Big Sis tried to grab her by the face, barely missing.  Big Sis's pupils turned red and steam came out of her ears.

The jeans did fit Lil' Sis--they were the same size as her new brand new ones, in fact.  But that was not the point.  The point was that Big Sis's ego was on the line and that Lil' Sis would not survive to get on the school bus in Big Sis's old jeans.

"Give them to her!  They're hers!"

"But Mooooooooom, they fit me!  They don't fit her any more, she's too big."

I intercept Big Sis's fist in mid-air.  "Get 'em off," I repeat.

"But none of mine are cleeeeeean!" Lil' Sis whines.

"Then wear your capris.  One more word and I take your cell phone.  And your snack money."

That usually puts the kibosh on the fight, at least until the "She's wearing MY scrunchie!" (or hair clip, barrette, ponytail holder, hairband, etc.) dispute breaks out, with said scrunchie yanked from offending head, along with some of the offender's hair, causing a scratching-and-slapping war so brutal that I end up confiscating two cell phones, a Nintendo DS, and a digital camera.

I know they don't take this crap after their mother. Of course, I will buy only size 8 jeans new, because they will stretch, and size 10 jeans at the Goodwill, because some other woman undoubtedly overshrunk them in the dryer.  No WAY am I a size 10.  I was a size 8 before I had kids, and I'm a size 8 now.  I wouldn't know about the pants Mom gives me, though.

They all have the tags cut out.

Being "wired" to your friends, neighbors, and even scant acquaintances has its advantages.

For antisocial misanthropes like me, networking on the Internet (my tool of choice is Facebook) keeps me aware that there are, in fact, other people in the world.  Who knew?  In my own neighborhood, even.  People who are related to me, went to high school or college with me, and who, inexplicably, even care about me.

And the more caring we express about each other, the more caring we feel.  Social networking builds friendships.  Keeping up with one another via the tools on the internet overcomes the embarrassment we shy folk might have over, for instance, walking up to a former high school classmate and saying, "Happy Birthday."

Not that we even had a clue when our high school classmates' birthdays were, until Facebook's Birthday Calendar app came along.

It's kind of cool—in fact, it's very cool—to know that a person you liked 20 years ago and still like very much now, is going to Disneyworld, and when she gets back, and whether she had fun.  You can go to her Facebook page and say, "Drive safe!"  "Say 'Hi' to Mickey for me!"  "Glad you're back—how was sunny Florida?"  It makes you feel more a part of your community.  You are reminded that, before you had children and vanished into a giant laundry pile or a workday cubicle, you were a kid, with pals.  You and these pals had fun together. I barely remember these halcyon days, but lately, on Facebook, it's all coming back to me.  I am not just a mom.  I am a person.  I was a girl.  I had a life!

Until Facebook, my homeboys and homegirls and I were all a bunch of zombie chauffeurs, driving our kids to endless sports and saying "Hey, wassup" in the Subway line and at church and in Food City, like ships, or frantic speedboats, passing in the night.

Now we have Facebook, and we're connected.  I know when my best friend when I was 5 years old has the flu.  I know when my best friend when I was 15 years old goes on a trip.  I know when the guy who played guitar in the rock band that I followed around when I was 20 is playing in a bar in Chicago. I know what's up with all of them—the big news, anyhow.  Promotions, divorces, diseases, divorces that are indistinguishable from diseases.  And they know my big news.  Using Facebook's photo albums app, we know what one another's children look like.  Mine are much better looking than any of theirs.

Now some of my chums have gone a step further with the internet networking thing, and have signed up for Twitter.  Twitter enables you to tell all of your friends precisely what you are up to, all the time.  They get updates on you, either via email, or on their mobile phones.

I am not sure I am ready for this.  I am not sure my friends are ready for this.

My "tweets" coming from Twitter might sound more like painful squawks.  Gripes.  Or ugly, private revelations.  The real, straight "dope" on what the Old Woman in the Shoe is up to, hour by hour, is not something anybody really wants to know, do they?

Shoedame is flossing her teeth for the first time in months.
Shoedame is overcome with self-loathing.
Shoedame shoved all the clean laundry under her bed so she wouldn't have to fold it.
Shoedame is facing another bout of chronic constipation.
Shoedame is suspecting that the entire legal system only exists so that rich men can get their Mercedes payments in on time.
Shoedame is buying chocolate which she intends to hide from her children.
Shoedame is evading all of her real-life responsibilities in order to waste an hour on Facebook and delude all of her cyber-friends into thinking she is doing something productive.

My tweeting friends are not posting anything like this.  Their tweets are very intimidating, in fact.  So far, all of my friends who are on Twitter seem to have amazingly productive and pure lives.  Their tweets sound like broadcasts from heaven:

Johnnie is building a house with Habitat for Humanity.
Johnnie is feeling chipper after a great, uplifting concert by Kids Need Food.
Johnnie is planting a tree, because the world needs more trees.
Johnnie is psyched about another workweek.  YEAH!

Not:

Johnnie wishes more than anything his wife would shut up and leave him alone.

Of course, if Johnnie put that in his Twitter update line, he would then need to go to Facebook and change his status from "In a Relationship" to "Single," once the real truth appeared on his wife's mobile phone.

So it turns out that, even in our Twitterpated world, hourly updates on Johnnie may be telling me just as much as the occasional "Hey, what's up?" "Nothin' much" in Subway, while he's just rushing back from taking his son to baseball and I'm in a rush to get my daughter to volleyball.  The truth is, we're both frail human wrecks who are victims of

1) our drive to reproduce;

2) our need to make sure that our kids do all the same things other kids do, all day, every day; and

3) our complete inability to pay for it. 

Plus the simple fact that any people, anytime, anywhere, who try to maintain a long-term relationship or marriage suffer and struggle mightily in the attempt, and miserably fail as often as they succeed.

But we can't post any of that on Twitter every hour, or on Facebook every day.  We can't be that honest, in public, at all.  So we underplay our bad stuff and broadcast our good stuff.  Which is competely healthy and normal. And if all I know is the "big news" on 75 of my favorite people, it's a lot more than what I knew about them two years ago.

And I do hope my homegirl and her crew get to Disneyworld and back okay, and that they have a good time, whatever a "good time" is.  The super thing about being on the same wire is, all the birdies are perched on it together, squawking whatever it is we squawk, good/bad true/false.  But we're all wired together, sending messages of support—life is hard; hang in there, oh those on my fabulous Friend List.  Be strong.  Remember, first and foremost, who you are.  Who you were, before all the crushing responsibilities of life piled on your shoulders.

Remember when we were alive, and childless, how we laughed?  Let's laugh today, if only over a stupid clip from Youtube.  For just five minutes, let's channel our inner children and remember why we became friends.  And if you ever want to give me the real story of what's ever going on with you on the inside while you build that Habitat house, let's get together, face to face, and spill our guts.

I was surprised that my intuition was correct: That people during this econcomic downturn were not prepared to cook at home and were turning to fast food.  A recent BBC article confirmed this.

However, YOU CAN DO IT.

Cooking at home requires some thought yet allows one to have tasty meals at a fraction of the cost