I Never Knew: The Surprise Party Story Part I

Before the Surprise! party, my sister said, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if the party went without a hitch and after all the anticipation of this stupid thing, you just wrote: It was fine. I mean, your followers would get SO MAD."

Yup, I can practically hear them clicking me off their blog rolls.

The night before, I was frantically trying to make these Martha Stewart tissue-paper flowers and it was SOOOO not working out.

They were supposed to look like this:



Instead, after two hours of accordion-folding and fluffing (Oh, the endless night of fluffing that didn't fluff the fluffstuff!) I only got these crappy pieces of tissue-paper GARBAGE.



I am a crafty person and I don't know what was going on--on the website, the pompoms looked like adorableness--maybe I'm just not crafty, but I AM!! All over her website, dozens of people said they made them and it made their bridal shower/birthday party/baby shower look absolutely GORGEOUS. I think that either their version of GORGEOUS differs greatly from mine--or I'm just a Martha craft failure.

I looked up at Peter after two hours and said, "I just don't think that this is an effective use of my time."

He looked at me and said, "I know. I wanted to say something to you earlier, but I didn't want to upset you."

In my mind, I had visions of how I wanted to decorate the space. I wanted to do such an AWESOME decorating job that people were going to have their minds BLOWN AWAY.

Unfortunately, I waited until the last minute and the tissue paper pom poms that were supposed to be just that thing turned into a pile of tissue-colored doo doo.

Instead, I wrapped up issues of the literary magazine I work for as an editor in gorgeous cardstock and folded a band of ribbon around them. They looked lovely. But Peter had his apprehensions about giving them out.

"They're philistines. They don't read literary magazines. They're just going to throw them in the garbage or leave them at the restaurant and you're going to get really mad."

I do know that about them and I did think about not giving them copies of the magazine, but then I figured the gift will be given from my heart and I can't control how they are received. I can only give what I have to give. I think Mother Teresa would have been proud, because you know how she's all giving out literary magazines to the philistines...and oh yeah, feeding the hungry and healing the sick.

The next morning, there was still a lot to do--my sister came over early to help. While she was here, Peter checked his email and found one from the Wicked Witch of the East--apparently, her daughter was sick and so they weren't coming. I was ECSTATIC to hear this news, although a bit surprised that the morning of the party, she's expecting us to be checking our email to get this information. Luckily, there was time to call the restaurant and get the tables rearranged.

The funniest thing was when Jenny texted her friend Emily to tell her that Wicked Witch of the East wasn't coming, Emily said, "What a BITCH! After WE'VE BEEN STRESSING all week about this, she didn't have the DECENCY to show up!"

I thought it was so cute and funny that people who have never even met Peter's sister are all, "What a BITCH!"

I wanted to get to the party an hour beforehand to set up and get things ready, but my sister and I are what we call "Vortexes of Time Suck." We inherited that from our mother. It's recessive and we both got the genes for it. For some reason, no matter how much time we are given to complete a task, the time is just sucked right out of the space-time continuum and it will take us an hour to do a simple task like pick up the cake from a bakery in the next town.

This is the reason why we will never become winners of Project Runway. Heidi will take a look at something we tried to make and say, "This looks like you threw it together in two minutes. AND it looks CHEAP."

So we get to the restaurant only about ten minutes before people are supposed to arrive and of course, people are already there. Fortunately, the restaurant threw up some cute balloons and decorations (Thank GOD) and so everything looked festive and cute already.

I forgot the candles and commissioned one of Peter's nephews to get them. I put out all the favors/place cards--I know it's a little strange since it's all family, but Peter DID NOT want to sit near his sister who hadn't been speaking to him the last seven years so I wanted to ensure that everyone knew where they belonged. We were SHOCKED that she emailed me to tell me she was coming and that night, she thanked me for inviting her twice.

I was all, "Uhm, I didn't actually invite you. I told your son that if he wanted to, he could invite you because I DIDN'T WANT TO BE RUDE and invite the entire family except for you and now we have regretted it since the minute you emailed us that you were coming. I mean, you didn't come to our wedding, you wrote in ALL CAPS on our response card WILL NOT BE ATTENDING. You didn't even send us a gift. I mean, I didn't send you an actual invitation. Can't you read between the lines?!?"

Okay, I didn't say that, I said, "Well, thanks for coming!"

To be continued....