Maple Leaf Mommy

My husband just celebrated his 37th birthday, and I managed to throw him a surprise party. It was surprisingly hard work. This whole lying thing is difficult stuff. One lie lead to another, and things got increasing complex, but I managed to pull it off and it was totally worth it to see the look on his face and hear him say, "But, wait, I'm not turning 40!!"

At one point, my husband was worried because I hadn't made a Facebook event to invite the usual dozen or so people over to our house for his birthday. He proceeded to make his own event and the opening line read, "Seems it's that time of year again. That time when my wife doesn't bother to set up a birthday event for me so I have to make one myself." Ha. Got'cha.

Of course his planning a Facebook event for the day after the surprise party event I was already inviting folks to managed to confuse the heck out of everybody. Pain in the keester keeping everything in line, let me tell you.

His mom and I worked together to plot the whole thing out. We booked the upstairs of a local bar and grill, Rock Bottom. This is the second time I've hosted a party there, as we threw a surprise birthday party for my mom a few years back. As a party venue, this place rocks. We got the entire second floor to ourselves, our own bar, our own pool table, three TVs (one ridiculously large) and our own washrooms. The kicker? They don't charge for the space, it's free. Of course we did order almost $300 in party platters, hoping to feed 25-30 people.


To go along with the party platters we brought tons of carrot cake. I also smuggled in La Crème Cow cheese and some crackers. I was chastised for buying platters of chicken wings, as sticky sauce fingers plus board games do not mix. On the other hand, I was told that the individually packaged La Crème Cow cheeses were the perfect gaming food. Score one for the blogger!


It got a bit titchy at one point, as some folks started heading home early, and others had yet to arrive. I sent my kids home with my parents, and was settling in for a pint and some games. We had planned on an evening of gaming, drinking and playing board and card games until closing time. However when our numbers dwindled down to ten they asked if we'd move to the ground floor and join the rest of the noisy bar. I wasn't impressed, but I could totally understand why they didn't want to waste staff on keeping the second floor open for ten people. We carried the leftover food, gifts and other assorted junk out to the van, and made to pack up and move to the ground floor.... but they relented at the last moment and said if we really wanted to we could stay upstairs. Um, yes please. So one very bored waitress coddled our group right through until 1:30am-ish.  My husband got rather drunk. He was so tipsy he was fairly useless for the card game we were trying to play, but I think a good time was had by all.


We had so much leftover food, we ended up having a dozen people over for gaming and leftovers the following evening. After sleeping all day my husband was almost up for round two (sans booze). So it turned out he had both parties after all. A two day birthday party extravaganza. We were both utterly pooped out come Sunday. I think maybe we're getting too old for this.