Around 11 a.m. he called me upstairs from my office. He had a card, wrapped gift, and suitcase set out for me. He wanted to give me my gift early, and then told me I needed to pack for the night. We were going to stay somewhere, but that was all he told me. The original plan (for Saturday morning) was I was supposed to go to the mall with my mom. That was made up and not happening. Mom and dad were watching the dog, but we had to come back mid-Saturday because they couldn't watch her all weekend. When I said "Huh, I wonder what they're up to, I wonder why." he replied "I don't know, I think it was something with the Corvette Club."
So I finished work at 1:00, met with a lady at church, called mom, and we headed out around 2:30.
I still didn't know where we were headed, but we ended up at the Moonrise Hotel in the Loop. We've stayed there once before during another staycation, which this kind of was in itself. We were both getting hungry, but I found out we had a dinner reservation at 6:00. Again, I had no idea where.
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| Staring at the chocolate... |
much, both of us felt ridiculously full afterwards. We did their four-course thing and started with the cheese, had a salad, then our meats, then chocolate for dessert. Our waitress brought me a rose, as well, which was a nice touch. Jarrod couldn't remember if he added that to his reservation or not, lol! It wasn't on the bill, so I guess it was from them since they knew it was my birthday.
We walked back to our hotel to go to the rooftop bar, which is a really cool spot if you're never been. It was a nice night out too.
Saturday morning we had breakfast at the hotel before heading onto other surprises. Ever since we left on Friday I was so excited to see what in the world Jarrod had planned! It was all in his hands, I had no clue what we would be doing.
So we left the hotel to head to the art museum, yay! We walked through most of it, except the new addition since we did that last time. Jarrod kept saying he had to watch our time, so we went to the second floor to check out the American and Native American art. It wasn't that great and I blazed through it. Jarrod kind of lingered a little bit. We finished up a bit early and I felt up to walking back to the truck; he had to park far away, but it was all downhill. We headed to lunch which was at...
Mai Lee in Brentwood, a Vietnamese place we wanted to try. We both got our usual pho and it was delicious! I had commented as we pulled up maybe we should check out Total Wine if we had time. Our lunch only took 30 minutes so we definitely did, and apparently needed to...
Total Wine is impressive, from a wine standpoint. Since we're more beer people, I'd say Friar Tuck's is better for that, but both are good places. It's a shame we don't have something like that closer to here. Anyways, I picked up a bottle of wine recommended by Wanda, and Jarrod got some beers. It took a while to check out, but then we were on our way home.
Driving home, Jarrod said I should go ahead and do my aerobika because he didn't think I'd have much time for my vest before we had to turn around and head back out to... whatever else he had planned. So I did. He also suggested I grab a hat before we left.
We pulled into town, up the road, turned onto our road. And there were a bunch of cars, which I kind of wondered about. But it's not uncommon for our neighbors at the end of the street to have a bunch of people over, so it wasn't too weird. Then I saw our garage door was open... and there were a ton of people in our driveway!
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| How it looked from my view. |
Oh-my-goodness. How amazing it was! There were so many people here, from all over, to surprise me for my birthday! It was so awesome. I got out of the truck, and my dad was the first to greet me with a hug. I couldn't hold it in, I started crying. I was so moved. It was a bit of a whirl, I can't even really remember if I made it back around to Jarrod to give him a hug or say something, but oh man. What an amazing feeling.
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| How it looked from everyone else's view. |
I walked inside to find my grandma Watson had made it down here too, which was awesome. The house was decorated to a T with banners and photos, an awesome little board with all kinds of facts about the year I was born, a lovely cake, food, drinks, the deck had tables and a popup tent over it, and I was told to also go downstairs. I found a big 30 covered in photos, and a jungle of balloons (that's what I'll call it, lol) with pictures of me hanging on them.
The rest of the day was spent mingling with everyone. I tried so hard to spend a little bit of time with every person. I wished I could have sat down and spent like an hour with everyone, but that's just not possible. Slowly, people started heading on their ways, and it was just a group of our friends that remained.
I told Jarrod I wanted the whole backstory to all of this, once everyone left. So once they did, he started diving into that...
Turns out he'd been planning this since February. February! And even so, he said that he knew he wanted to do this for me before my 29th birthday. Wow. That's just... awesome.
For the longest time, he was trying to figure out how to get me out of the house, so everyone would have plenty of time to set up our house, and determined that us staying somewhere Friday would be best and seem least suspicious.
He had started asking for addresses from people months ago because, as he told them, "I can't find the address book, and I obviously can't ask Jamie where it is." Ha! Formal invitations were sent out—who knew?—with RSVP to his mom, who was even out of town during a lot of the planning leading up to this.
Then all kinds of minute details came into play...
Like the day before, when I called my mom? He had JUST gotten off the phone with them, like right as I was calling her. He was in the garage and had called them to tell them what the deal was so their stories would match, and they should say that they had a Corvette Club thing and that was why they couldn't watch the dog all weekend. Wow, what are the odds. And just in time.
When we were leaving the art museum, we were ahead of schedule, and he was debating every little way to draw it out more. That's why we went to check out the American art, but then I rushed through it. He tried to look at some pieces longer, not because he was interested, but because he wanted to kill time, haha! And then I said I felt up to walking to the truck, which was perfect because that took more time, lol.
We pretty much NEEDED to go to Total Wine after lunch, because otherwise we would arrived at home way too soon. The invite said for people to be here at 2:30 sharp, with the plan that we would get here at 3:00. Jarrod even doubled back and looked over a aisles more than once to kill more time so we wouldn't be too early.
And there were so many other little things.
It makes sense, now, why he was on his phone more that day. And why it wasn't synced up with his truck, something he almost always does. I had noticed those things, but didn't think much of them.
I think a lot of people were wondering if I was truly surprised, but I was! It was such a great day, and made me feel so special and so very loved by so many people.
(If you haven't seen my video on Facebook, I posted one the other day thanking everyone for coming out and telling a little bit of this story.)
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