My Mother's Birthday and Great Customer Service

So...my mother's birthday, her 69th birthday is at the end of the month and I um.....sort of let the month get away from me on the whole gift thing......I thought okay I'll send flowers, eh, no......did that last year and besides I have to send them to her next month on mother's day because what kind of horrible daughter would I be if I forgot her on mother's day.....

My mom and I have what I refer to as the "rocky road ice cream" relationship. We love one another with all our hearts, but it's been in the rocky road direction and often we can end up in a melt down...... You know how you know people who have a relationship with their mother and/or father that is like something out of a fairy tale, or maybe not that great but something that you have looked at during your life and kind of envied? I have a friend like that, her name is Lisa.....she has these parents who have made being a kid an easy thing, being a teen, not just an easy thing, but they were by her side when she needed them without the lecture coming out of their mouth first thing.....and now, her parents are still married after 48 years and to this day I know she and her parents are extremely close.....but that has and never will be the kind of relationship I have with my mother......

She is a great grandparent and loves her grandchildren, but with us not living close, it makes the closeness hard......I often wonder if in the back of my mind, did I move away at 20, get married, join the military all just to get away because I thought it would be easier then hanging around? And so for 20 years we have done the ups and downs of continuing our rocky road relationship with her visiting me and I visiting her.

She lives with my sister, their relationship is obviously different then mine. I'm okay with it being that way, I mean I have been away for 20 years and she has lived with her for 17 years, so of course they are going to be closer then my mother would be with me.......am I envious.....funny, I'm not.

So......back to the birthday present......I searched on the internet yesterday for the perfect gift basket to send to my mother. It has to be just right or I would worry about my mother not being happy with it (my issue not her's). I looked on my favorite site (although I have not ordered from them, I been sent a gift basket from them in the past) which is Harry and David, I had picked out what I wanted to send her and I even qualified for a free gift that I included with the basket, and then I went to check out and I even knew it would be late so I did not bother to rush the delivery, I just left it as standard, I knew I had waited and my mother would be okay with it coming a couple days late since the no later then date was like the 2nd of May and her birthday is in April, but when I got to the final page where you check out, I was stunned to see that their service charge, standard delivery was over 30.00.....I was like okay, yeah time to find another gift, that is 1/3 the cost of what I had paid for her gift.....outrageous...then they charged me a fuel fee...... forget that!

So on to something else.....I went back to my search page and found this great site called adorablegiftbaskets.com and found something comparable and it cost less and the shipping was less then 9.00 and I found a coupon online that saved me money off my purchase as well....but the great customer service came in today.....yesterday my computer battery died and computer went into hibernation while I was finalizing the transaction so when I plugged it back in I had to refresh the page, which then put my billing address in the shipping place and I never caught it.....the phone number I caught and changed it to my mother's but the address, I just never saw.....so today they called me and asked me if my mother lived with me and I was like, um.....no......why and they told me that I had the package being shipped to my house......and they saw the state phone number and wanted to check if it was just a cell number, which it could very well have been.....I was so relieved that they called, what would I have done if that had come here and not to my mother? I would have felt horrible......not to mention how would I explain to my mother what a moron I am because I can't enter her address without messing it up?? How many companies catch things like that? How many companies really care?