Care Packages

Recently I have become acquainted with "Care Packages". Since my new son-in-law has deployed to Iraq with the Marines, I have been trying to learn all I can about what should or should not be included in a care package. It's a topic that until last year I am ashamed to say had never given much thought. It must have been categorized in my brain as one of those things that other people do. When I was becoming acquainted with the family that my daughter was about to marry into, one of the conversations turned to his first deployment and the fun of sending him care packages. Fun? What? That idea had never occurred to me before. The whole process really sounded like a chore, but little did I know how very much fun I would have with it all! As the deployment date approached, I started doing internet searches for ideas. It became important to me that the he receive something from home as soon after he got to Iraq as possible. I'm not sure why this mattered so much to me, but it's possible that it was my awareness of my own tendency to procrastinate! My decision to send the first care package ASAP was probably to keep me from putting it off until he was almost ready to return home. The stories that his parents told me about some of his fellow Marines who never received anything in the mail really made an impact.

A couple of days after he left for Iraq, I went to visit my daughter at their home in North Carolina. While I was there, we shopped together for items we wanted to send in our first care package. It turned out to be so much fun! We found so many more things than we could send in the first box, so we already had inspiration for box number two!! It worked out great for us to collaborate as we learned the ropes: flat-rate boxes from the post office are FABULOUS for taking the whole weight thing out of the equation, they limit what we can send at one time and force us to save something for the next package, addressing a box going to a deployed service member is a little different than one going to somewhere here in the states, and don't forget the customs form (that's the trickiest part for me). So we sent the first box on September 11 and didn't tell him it was on it's way, so he would be surprised. Astonishingly, it arrived in one week! Go USPS!

To clear up a common rumor that I've heard, IT IS OK TO SEND RELIGIOUS MATERIAL. Some people are saying that we cannot include anything religious in the boxes because it would be offensive to the locals. That is incorrect. To quote my son-in-law, "Anything religious is great out here because it keeps people's heads on straight if you know what I mean. Religion is a very important thing to have out here. It sometimes is the only thing that gets people through deployments." I couldn't have said it better myself.

After returning home to Houston, I could hardly wait to start on a care package and see if I could do it all by myself. You know what? I did it! As I started putting care package number two together, I kept thinking about my own son in college and how much I miss him and how proud I am of him and so I made up a box for him. All of that was so fun that I then decided to send a box to my daughter, also. What started as a care package project for a Marine in Iraq ended up being care packages for all three of my charges. Now to get to work on the next round...