The Day After

Yesterday was my mom's 80th birthday party. Everything was wonderful. We rented the Senior Center where she belongs to hold the party. It was just the right setting for it. We arranged the party time so that everyone could come straight from church which is very close to the center. Mom is a member of her church choir, and some of the choir members were able to attend. Almost all of the family made it. She was just thrilled. She had no idea that we were plannning to throw her a party. We didn't really plan on it being a surprise, but somehow she never caught on to what we were doing. Her actual b-day was Thursday and we told her that we were going to have to wait until Sunday to celebrate by taking her out to dinner on Sunday afternoon so that all the grandkids would be able to be there. Also my brother is a highschool track coach and he had a meet on Thursday night, so that seemed a good enough reason not to celebrate on the actual day. I told her that we had reservations for Rizzo's - an italian restaurant that we all love to go to, except Mom, which was kind of funny in a way. I think she was a little disappointed by our choice of restaurants, but was too nice to say anything. My mom's husband Art was to bring her down to the party at 12:45. The party started at 12:30. Well, 12:45 comes and goes. 12:50 comes and goes, 12:55 comes and goes, we're starting to wonder if Art forgot and they went straight to the restaurant, but they finally made it a little after 1:00. She was so surprised and happy to see everyone there. She just stood there with tears in her eyes and laughing saying "oh my, oh my" she was very cute..................I just love a good surprise!...............when it's not on me of course!
The memory book we did was HUGE success. We had pages from when she was a kid all the way till now. We also had everyone write a memory that they had about Mom and we are going to put them in the back of the book. All in all it was a great day!