Every Day's A Blessing: Surprises Galore!!

Oh. My. Goodness. Today may have been the longest, craziest, most stressful yet fun day I've had EVER. (And that is certainly saying something!) This evening I threw a "surprise" birthday party for Ben. I use quotation marks because I was apparently not good enough at making sure he didn't suspect anything or catch on, but nonetheless he didn't know exactly what to expect. However, making this party actually happen was an event in itself.

I had decided to have the party here in our front yard, and rather than go the "you're old/Over the Hill" route I planned a pirate-themed kid's party. So to start with, I had to come up with a way to get Ben out of the house so I could decorate and set everything up. Our friend Bob offered to take Ben out for a few hours. When I first suggested this to Ben, his reply was, "I really just want to take a nap on Saturday." Um... no? Finally he gave into the plan to go see the Avengers. Which turned out to no longer be showing as of this weekend. Ended up the guys just went to a few bars and killed time for a couple hours.

Then there was the whole no-electricity thing. We got hit with some crazy wind and thunderstorms late Friday night, and we lost all power in our house just after 11pm. It tried to pop back on twice at 5:30am, but only stayed on about 30 seconds and then cut off again. Then there was nothing. Not just for our neighborhood either - much of our area was without power. This meant the people I had ordered my catering from were not open, leaving me with no meal to provide our guests. There was no ice ANYWHERE, as people were frantically trying to save their perishables. It was just ridiculous.

But we were having this party. Ben's birthday had been pretty minimal up to that point, and despite what he'd tell you he had been fairly mopey all week long. I decided if we and many of our friends were going to be hot and without electricity, we might as well share in the misery and enjoy ourselves. So I continued getting ready for the party. I finally found an open pizza place, and although the wait time was 1 1/2 hours to get my pizzas, we had real food for people to eat. When Ben arrived, he seemed genuinely pleased to have everyone there wishing him a happy birthday. There was AMAZING cake, games, tattoos, eyepatches... overall a good time. I unfortunately was so over the whole thing by the end I will almost certainly never attempt a surprise party ever again. But we all had a great time celebrating Ben and what a great husband/dad/friend he is to all of us, and that alone was worth every second of labor put into the event.