85th Birthday Card Shower a Stunning Success

by jphilo | Sep 6, 2013 | Family

Many, many thanks to everyone who sent Mom a card for her 85th birthday. The card shower was a stunning success with mail coming from all over the country and from every era of her adult life. For example…

• Many of her nieces and nephews (a large group as Mom’s side of the family is a prolific bunch) sent cards.
• Several of Dad’s cousins (he was an only child, so no nieces and nephews there) and their children also sent birthday greetings.
• So did friends and neighbors for her many years in LeMars,
• and her eleven years in Boone.
• Most touching of all were the many, many cards from students from her first year of teaching sixth grade in Roland, Iowa in the late 1940s. Not only did her former students send cards, they recalled anecdotes and described their lives since then.

How do I know what was in them? Because Mom felt it necessary to spread the love by requiring my presence as she opened each piece of mail. Once she read then, she passed them on and expected a comment about each one.

Which I did.

Because I’m such a good daughter. And because the sooner she was finished with the cards, the sooner we could dig into the homemade German’s Chocolate birthday cake (dairy-free version) made for the occasion.

Unfortunately, the cake’s all gone or I’d offer you a piece.

But the cards are in a neat stack for Mom to peruse whenever the mood strikes her. Your cards were truly a gift that keeps on giving. Again, many, many thanks for participating.

Camp Dorothy Card Shower in the Works

by jphilo | Aug 19, 2013 | Family

Camp Dorothy’s namesake has a birthday coming up.

She’ll be a wee bit older than in the picture above which was taken in 1929, some months after her birth on September 3. Which happened to be Labor Day in 1928 when Dorothea Lorraine Hess made her debut appearance at the Pipestone County Hospital.

This September 3, 2013 Dorothy will turn 85.

So the Bro, Sis, and I are organizing a card shower in honor of the occasion. Though Mom’s not much of a letter writer anymore, she still loves to get cards. She reads them over and over, until she squirrels them away in stacks, where they wait for me to find them months later and discard.

But I digress.

Here’s the big question. Would you help make Dorothy’s 85th birthday extra-special by participating in the card shower? If you need Mom’s address, please leave a comment, and I’ll send it to you in an email. And I’ll do a post after the big day to let you know how the shower went and what Dorothy had to say about it.

Right after we watch Judge Judy, of course.