I Sent Flowers--and Not Because I Need to Say "Sorry"

Since I live in Texas, and my mom lives in Alabama, she hasn't gotten to really experience much of the "exciting" aspects of pregnancy that (I guess) grandmothers look forward to. Namely, she wouldn't be here to celebrate the news of whether we're expecting a girl or a boy. I wanted to include Mom and share the news with something more ceremonious than a text message, so a month or so before I was to learn the baby's gender, I began brainstorming ideas for how to share the news (with the help of Google.) Here are some of the ideas I stumbled upon:

1. Mail her a pink or blue cake that is frosted in a different color so she has to cut into it to find out! (cute, but impractical given my proximity)
2. Insert sonogram picture displaying the baby's private bits into a stained glass lamp. Mom thinks it's just a stained glass lamp (which is a great gift in and of itself) and then she also gets to see her grandbaby's junk!
3. Give her an "It's a Boy!" jigsaw puzzle and make her work for it. (I would totally make it a 500-piece)
4. Send her a greeting card. Write the baby's gender inside. (for the creative types)
5. If you're finding out close to Easter, fill a bunch of Easter eggs with tiny blue socks. (That's much better than blue...candy...for...Easter)
6. Custom fortune cookies.
7. Give her some blue yarn and a pattern for baby booties and put her ass to work knitting.
8. Give her a teddy bear wearing a blue t-shirt. (She gave me a bear holding pom poms when I made the 7th grade cheerleading squad, so this would be coming full circle.)
9. Give her a t-shirt that says "Proud Grandma of a Beautiful Boy" (for those who want to be very direct)
10. Give her a bunch of balloons. Each balloon has a letter inside it. Have her pop the balloons and arrange the letters to spell out the sentence, "It's a Boy!" (Have you met my mom? The only thing she'd pop is me!)
11. Send her a pinata full of blue goodies. As she hits it over and over, the anticipation builds until- BAM! (ugh)

Google FAIL. Good thing I came up with a brilliant idea all my own. It also fulfills Item #56 on my list of 101 Things: Send flowers.

Mom's made no secret of how much she wants the baby to be a boy. The only problem is, she believes that karma will only give me girl babies, so that I am forced to raise dramatic, high maintenance daughters who are just like me. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a bad kid, but my mother will tell you, she's exhausted. So, for four months I had to listen to her tell me about how karma is a bitch who has her sights set on me. Fully believing her, I brace myself for this outcome. Of course, we now know this is not the outcome, so I was even more thrilled to share the news. She loves flowers and rarely receives them, so I called Dorothy McDaniel's Flower Market in Birmingham and ordered a small arrangement of brightly colored flowers. This part would have been easier if I were ordering a "girl" arrangement, because I could have just said "make it pink!" but since it was for a boy, I had to say "make it something that doesn't scream 'girl'". Something like this, for instance:

This is the card message I had enclosed, notifying her that she would be having a grandson:

Karma will have to wait.

Love,

Samantha, Steve and Robinson