Is life really like a commercial?

After running around doing errands for about two hours with my son, we finally get home at 5pm.  My son starts on his homework while I start on dinner.  After dinner, at about 7pm,  my son opens his bookbag and tells me that he has a surprise note for me from his teacher.  No, I’m not in trouble!” he smiles. “This is something really good!”

I tear around the staple that held the folded note together fully expecting it to be some kind of progress note.  Maybe a note saying that my kid had done a great job in school that day.  My son’s teacher would do that. She’s an incredible educator.

Instead, I open up a parent’s worst nightmare! A surprise baby shower is going to be held tomorrow for my son’s teacher (an awesome, caring teacher that every kid should be lucky to have). The note goes on to say that any presents or items being sent in for the shower need to be given to another teacher who will keep them secret until the party begins.

So in typical parent fashion, I ask”Why didn’t you tell me when we were at the store? ” And of course, I get the typical kid response, “I didn’t know!”

We had just spent two hours going from store to store running errands. We passed card stands and gift card stands. It would have been very easy to pick up a gift and we would have been good to go.

Instead. . . . . .my son and I were both in the very unpleasant situation of trying to figure out a way to put together a gift that he could present to his favorite teacher tomorrow without having the time to run out to the store again.

Enter “Stamp Up”!  Back in the day when my son was little and I was a stay-at-home mom hanging out in the backyard, one of my neighbors invited me to a demonstration for a product called “Stamp Up!”  At the demonstration, the host was selling stamps and paper and markers and pastels that you could use to make cards and lots of other stuff. Like all of the my neighbors, I bought the stuff and then started to make cards for every occasion.

However, for the past 12 years, the  Stamp Up stuff – two huge boxes of it- has occupied a tiny space in the back of my attic.  After all, single moms of special needs kids who hold full-time jobs and go to graduate school once a week really don’t have time for that sort of thing.  But I was desperate. I had to at least make sure that my son had a card to hand to his teacher tomorrow. As I pulled the box down from the attic, I remember the sales pitch I heard when I bought the stuff 12 years ago. “. . . and you’ll never know when you will absolutely need a card and won’t be able to get to the store to get one. Wouldn’t it be cool to just make one? ”    At the time, I thought that a “card emergency” was a little over the top, but at 7pm this evening, I had a real honest-to-goodness card emergency at my house.

By 8pm, my son and I  had pulled out all the old stamps and stamps pad(the ink still worked great!) and made his teacher a baby shower card.  The card along with some money that I put in it will work just fine.  With the help of “Stamp Up!” , we survived our  “card emergency”.  My son will  go to school and proudly hand in a gift for his favorite teacher.

So as I sit her at 9:30, totally exhausted from the ordeal, I feel like I’ve just completed a real-life commercial for “Stamp Up!”    I’m really happy that I had the stuff in my house – even if I don’t take it out again for another 12 years!