Celebrating 20 years

I mentioned in my last post that I picked up something at Wal-Mart that I could not tell you about, I tried to link it here but it did not work. I made an album for my parents. On wal-mart's website you load pics into a template and it creates this gorgeous album for you (I made that sound easy. Nevermind that I spent hours scanning photos, choosing which ones to put in and then another couple hours screwing around with the template to get it to look just how I wanted it to). I had photos from their wedding day, and every other page had pics of the family at various points of our lives. There were shots of mom and dad as kids, pics of me and the boys growing up, etc. It turned out really well and kind of became a focal point for last night's festivities.

I gotta say, I am pretty darned pleased with myself over how well yesterday went.

On June 27th, my parents will have been married for 20 years. In this day of 50% divorce rate, I felt that this needed to be celebrated. I enlisted the help of a close family friend and we put our heads together to have a surprise party, at her place since mine is simply not big enough(I wonder if that qualifies as the "understatement of the year").

With much behind the scenes work and quite a few untruths told, we got my parents to the destination with a promise of a casual dinner for Mom's birthday (which was last week). Mom almost cancelled that morning, thankfully L was able to talk her out of it.

Here they are, walking in:


Shortly after the "Suprise! Happy Anniversary!" and the barrage of "did you know?", my mom turned to me and said "Ok, now I can't wait to see what you really did with my wedding photos!" (Several weeks ago I borrowed her wedding album under the pretense of scanning them for my scrapbook, heehee!).

They were very pleased with what I did with her pictures;



We had lots of food, stories were shared (especially after they opened the book) and we had them cut the cake with the knives they had used to cut their wedding cake (mom had passed them onto me on my wedding day, they are safely packed away again hopefully to be used again for my brothers' or my children's weddings, just like her wedding veil is awaiting use again)



We also had the dress I wore as flower girl on display in the corner, although for some reason I didn't snap a photo of it*. The dress has been worn by a very large ragdoll that I've had since childhood named "Sally Braids". She has long yellow yarn hair that used to be, uh, braided (hence the name). But I digress...

The night was a great success, with friends and family gathered. My parents do so much for me and my little family it was so nice to be able to do something for them. They appreciated it, and rewarded me tonight with this:



That's chicken, with a beer can shoved up inside, cooked on the bbq. So good I could have eaten a whole on myself. Mmmmmmmm...beer chicken...

*the chicken I snap a photo of...the artfully displayed flower girl gown, no. Sigh