Biggest Surprise!

Happy Father's Day!

I now understand Mike's crazy eagerness to give gifts early. I managed to keep his Father's Day gift a secret for 20 days. There were several times that I started to say, "I can't wait until you see..." and then would catch myself and say some lame thing like, "...the color of the flowers outside."

Let's backup. Mike has been dreaming of a certain grill for about a year now. Really, his grill has been on the decline longer than that, but a grill gets put pretty low on the totem pole when you are finishing a basement. Or when your wife gets a gigantic piano. Anyway, he's had a printout of it sitting on his desk for a long time. He's made notes about it, talked to different places about, and looked it up on the Internet for hours.

And he really does ask for so little. I almost have to beg him to leave the house and do something he enjoys - "Please! Go play golf!" "What? You want to go out with friends from work?!? Please - have some fun!" I just for once wanted to be able to pull off a gigantic surprise with something I KNEW he would love.

So I did my shopping and got his grill ordered in early June. I had to set the delivery for Friday since they unfortunately don't deliver on Sundays. Thursday I set the time for 9:30 and called my sister and dad to try to come up with a way to get Mike out of the house so it could be delivered (a small hurdle to have your husband work from home in this situation). We came up with a plan that instead of having Mike leave (virtually impossible) then I would tell him that the kids and I were going to be building a giant fort on the deck on Friday. This would hopefully keep him from coming upstairs if he heard any loud clanging going on while it was being delivered.

Friday morning arrived. I had let the kids in on the secret Thursday night and BEGGED them to please work hard not to let it slip. They did great. At 8:30 I delivered coffee to him in his office just to look out his window and see where I needed to place any large pool items to block the view of the stairs. At about 8:50 Mike was wandering around the backyard and I couldn't figure out what he was doing. So, I casually asked him if he had meetings that day and he replied that he actually didn't have any. I walked back in the house in a small panic. No meetings meant he could be walking around whenever and not glued to his office! At 9:10 he came in and I asked what he planned for work and he said not much, except he had to go downtown at some point to get something. I about did a jump for joy, but I casually said, "Really? I think you should go now." He just looked at me and asked why and I played it off that he should get it done early so he had the rest of the day free without the trip hanging over his head. He said he had thought the same thing. The entire time of this conversation he spent super-gluing some little knob for the diving board. After a precious 30 seconds I grabbed it from him and said, "Don't worry...I'll finish this." He grabbed his bag and we were closing the garage door by about 9:15. I called up my sister and dad and started screaming with joy about how great this was going to work out!!

Maddie wanted to know when we were actually going to build the fort.

Once I explained there wasn't going to actually BE a fort that day (had to promise it would happen some day) I pretty much paced the floor. I knew I had about an hour before I could start to expect Mike home. Of course, the delivery guys were about 10 minutes late and apologized profusely, but they got this grill upstairs, took out the old one and the kids and I raced to Target to get batteries for the lights on the grill. (We literally ran through the parking lot with Maddie yelling, "I've never done this before...you never let us run in a parking lot!" and Jake yelling, "Umm...this is kind of embarrassing!") We cruised home, got the batteries changed out and sat down.

10 minutes later Mike walked through the door. We had all the blinds closed and told Mike he had to come out and see the amazing fort we had made. I did manage to videotape the results; very poor quality - it's mostly for the audio. But I wanted to get it on tape how LITTLE he gets excited about things. And when we watched it together - we agreed that this reaction is EXTREMELY excited for Mike. He did admit that he was about to say some words, but realized we had two kids standing by us, so he kept it "G".



I wish I could lavish gifts on him like this every week. He would deserve every one of them.