Celebrating A-100 Graduation

I wanted to post something today, but I was feeling lazy, so I’m dipping into past events as an excuse to post this surprise party video.

Since we’ve been married, Natalie has made it very clear that she wanted a surprise party, thus making it impossible to plan a surprise party for her birthday. Every year as her birthday approached, I’d be asked if she was getting her surprise party this year.

Fast forward to 2009 with her passing her oral exam, getting called into A-100 and getting our Hermosillo post, I decided I should do something a little special for her, so I chose this my chance to catch her off guard with a surprise party.

I decided to use the Sunday evening after the swearing-in ceremony because 1) it was short notice, so it had to be a Sunday so people could attend and 2) the ceremony provided an event to actually celebrate (though it really turned more into a post-Flag Day party, just a week after the fact).

After hacking into her facebook account and scrolling through her cell phone on this rare occasion it wasn’t in her hand, I was able to invite several hometown, high school, college and area friends, former work colleagues, family and some fellow 148th members to the tune of about 80 invitees altogether (about 40 arrived).

I told the lie of our apartment in association with a fictional local restaurant group was hosting a Taste of Crystal City-type event in our apartment’s party room, which she bought hook-line-and-sinker.

And I spent about a week preparing food and decorations, storing them at friends’ places and making up excuses about preparing lots of food to give to our friends as we got closer to the party.

There were several close calls, luck and lots and lots of assistance from others to pull this off right under nose, but as you can tell from the video, she definitely was not expecting this.

So without further ado, enjoy!



P.S. For some reason, the video seems to be interfering with the comments section. If you really want to leave a comment, you need to click on this post's title first. Then at the bottom of the page, the comment section springs back to life.