This year, Tyler finally joined the 3-0 club! And after much back-and-forth debate about whether to throw a party or not, I decided to go ahead and do it. I hesitated because I knew it would be rather tough to plan, prepare for, and throw a party without any of his help. I also thought it might be nice to forego the party and use the money we'd spend on that to take a short trip together, but as a close friend reminded me, Tyler is the most sociable person on the planet, so a party would be right up his alley. And I'm glad we did it, but it sure wasn't easy to do...
For one, you have to figure out a way to contact a ton of people without Tyler finding out. And since my husband and I share email access on the IPad, both check messages on our land line, and often see text messages on each other's phones, it wasn't easy. But, with the help of a quick search on his phone for contact info, I was able to fill in the gaps and put together a list of emails/addresses. Some invites were sent via snail mail and the rest went out on a secret email account that I set up. And we were lucky enough to have a great group of people show up to help surprise him...
It also takes a lot of sneaking around to plan food and buy supplies without the surprisee knowing. We both have access to online banking and credit card info, so my mom had to go with me to purchase most things and we used her credit card. Any food that was made ahead of time had to be stored at my sister's house and all other supplies were kept at my mom's. The tables and chairs were stored in the neighbor's garage so that we could quickly move them in once the setup process began...
And the setup process looked a little something like this....Tyler, his Dad, and Caleb left a little after 1:00 to go out to Cabelas in Northwest Indiana (a nice two to three hour time filler). We frantically began setting up once we knew they were far enough away that they wouldn't turn around to grab anything that was forgotten. Tables and chairs were moved in, toys were put away, tents were setup (the impending storms were a whole 'nother problem I did not have time to stress about), food was prepared and set out, decorations were hung, coolers were filled, and much running around and sweating was done along the way. By 4:00 guests arrived....
And by 4:30 I got a phone call saying they'd be home soon and that Caleb fell sound asleep in the car. That turned out to be a good thing because when he walked in the door first, he didn't even think to shout out about the fact that there were a ton of strange people in his family room...he was barely awake enough to find me and make way for Daddy to be totally...
SURPRISED!!!!
