Last weekend my dad and I pulled of the ultimate surprise party for my mom -- she retired from working at the Dublin Library and Friday was her last day and when she arrived home, a dozen of her closest friends and Dad and Andy and I were there to shout "surprise!!!" and have a little party in her honor.
I was so stunned that we'd managed to pull it off so successfully -- she's telling people now that she can't even think of a time in the last few weeks that she felt suspicious or even felt an inkling of what was going on!! shhshh-shhshh!! (that was my code with dad -- it comes from the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy" and in my family when we do it, it means either we're being very sneaky so shhh, or it means that there is a squirrel in the back yard that Alpine needs to chase after!!)
For the party I made eggrolls and homemade pasta sauce with sweet italian sausage in it -- I browned the sausage and then added it to the sauce and cooked them in the sauce for HOURS. It was soooooo good. I was glad the eggrolls turned out well -- they almost didn't get made! The Tuesday of the week I started a new medicine (that I knew had a side effect of nausea) and I was terribly nauseated -- so decided to start the med another time -- b/c if I'd stayed on it, the smell of the grocery store and of making the eggrolls would have made me so ill.
Dad made a couple bowls of salad, and we'd gotten some shrimp from Sams club -- and he also got a cake from Sams and had them write Congratulations on it -- well that's what they were supposed to write. It had Congratulation because the daft girl ran out of space!!
I got some balloons and a banner and some "Happy Retirement" napkins for decoration.
Everyone had a very good time and it was so cool to see that we'd actually surprised Mom and that she didn't want to kill us for it! :D heehee! I'll post some of the pics from the party soon as we get them downloaded off the camera.