happy birthday to you....

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I found it highly amusing.

Sweet youngest daughter will celebrate the 28th anniversary of her birth tomorrow. I had asked her sister if she would ride with me up to see her and take her out to lunch on Oct. 9, but the girl in Decatur had to work on Tuesday, so I told her to mark her calendar and we would go up a day early, which would be more likely to be a surprise than showing up on the actual day wearing party hats and blowing tooters.

Then I thought: would it not be hilarious if we had a big box to surprise her when she opened it up? Oh, yes!
So I went to the appliance store last week, flattened a washer box, and put it in the back of my car. The bottom was already cut out when I got it, so we could just hunker down and put it over our heads. Went to the Just-A-Buck store and bought rolls of wrapping paper (baby Muppets) and covered the box. Also got those little conical hats with elastics (that kids always pop their necks with, bringing the festivities to a screeching halt with buckets of tears). As well as a pack of those little tooters you blow in the mouthpiece so they unroll and make the bleating sound. (They used to have a feather glued to the end so you could blow it in someone's ear and tickle them - but China has got too cheap to put the colored feathers on any more - or they are raising naked chickens.)

I got up this morning about 4:30 and got to Decatur before 7:00. We left Decatur about 9:15 to be sure we would arrive in Chattanooga before noon. There was a small quantity of sneakiness involving the husband and co-worker/BFF at the office. We were so cramped up, squished under the box, and giggling, it probably looked very suspect - plus the flaps on the top would not stay down, due to my party hat. I'd wanted the friend to be standing by with a camera to catch the expression on her face when we popped up out of the box: but she was behind instead of in front, and only caught the two of us, with party hats, askew and tooters extended at their full unfurled stage, bleating wildly.

So after we went to lunch and embarrassed her as much as possible without getting escorted out of the restaurant, she agreed to 're-stage' the surprised expression for the camera. We got back in the box, nearly as amused with ourselves the second time, and had an instant replay with phone cams. at the ready. I'm not smart enough to include photos here: that's what I have tech.savvy daughters for!

I think she was surprised, as well as thoroughly amused. She readily tells all that she got her strange sense of humor from her mom, so hopefully it was more toward the entertaining end of the scale, rather than mortifying, and if not: 'You get what you get' with your genetic history, it's a package deal, sweetie...