The festivities started Friday morning, much to my surprise and delight. I had reserved Friday as the day to clean the house and tie up all of the loose ends related
to party decorations and food, and seeing as how I waited until the week before to start planning the party, that was a whole lotta loose ends. Doing anything productive is a challenge when a two year old runs the household, so I was pretty stressed about getting everything done.
The front door flew open around 10:30 that morning and Tim walked in, claiming he had "forgotten something" and asked me to go out to his car to get his bag while he looked for it. He was being all weird and cryptic and wouldn't explain why he didn't just bring his bag inside in the first place, or why he needed his bag at all, and I was like, Seriously, dude? I so do not have time for this.
Nonetheless, out of sheer curiosity, I stopped what I was doing and opened the door, and standing on my front porch, with a sheepish grin, was my little sister Rachel! She had flown in from Colorado Springs that morning, and Tim was totally in on it and had picked her up from the airport and delivered her to my stoop. OMG, I was shocked! I had no idea that she was coming for Alex's birthday party. In fact, I talk to her all of the time and totally believed her when she said she was bummed she couldn't make it to the party and wished she could be there and so on and so forth with the lies and the trickery...and yet, there she was, on my doorstep. Awesome.
And even better than the pleasure of her company alone, I now had someone to distract Alex so I could actually get some work done. What a lifesaver. He was so excited to see his Aunt Rachel and they had a great time playing together. And, of course, she lugged her camera and umpteen camera-related accessories through airport security so that she could document our weekend. Gotta love having a photographer in the family. (Except for the part about having to narrow down 400 good pictures and pick a few great ones to post. I was as selective as I am capable of being, picked a few to feature below, then plunked the rest into a slideshow at the end.)
Eventually I gave Alex one of his big presents from us - a water and sand table - so that he and Rachel could play with it outside while I worked inside. It took us a while to assemble it, which is so lame because there are only three parts to the darn thing. But it was super fun to see Alex so excited about his first big gift, and I was having so much fun that I kind of forgot that I had things to do inside.
To be continued...
2 comments:
That is so SWEET of Tim (& Rachael) to put the surprise together. I bet you were ecstatic. My little sis once tried surprising me but Nathan threw me his phone and said "your sister left voicemail on my phone". And then I hear the words "....I want to surprise Chandra...". I wanted to smack him. DUH!
Great pictures! By comparison, search all the albums we have at home- the so few good ones and the many, many not so good ones we've kept over the years. Hooray for digital photography! Hooray for Rachel. Hooray for everybody. I gotta go- making chili for a fish fry.
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