Surprised by surprise

There's one thing you should know about my dear sweet wonderful wife. She cannot, for the life of her, pull of a surprise. She's horrible at being sneaky and inevitably drops hints and teases that give things away. Contrast this with my family growing up. One summer day my mom and aunt tell me and my brothers "Let's go to the beach." We all piled in the car, but two hours later we were still on the highway... "Oh, we're going to a different beach than usual," they said (we could reach the beach in an hour and a half from our house normally).



About halfway down the New Jersey Turnpike, they put in a tape that had been put together by a DJ my Aunt knew. It played songs specially dedicated to the family (like "Put Me in Coach" for Seth) and announced the weather plan for Florida... we were going to Disney for two weeks.*



Anyway... Back to Nicole. While I delight in surprising her, she's really more of a "open the presents when you get them and sneak a peak into the kitchen when I'm making a special meal" kind of girl.



So when she surprised me on Wednesday... I was really surprised. Without me suspecting a single thing, she organized a large (and well attended) party to celebrate my thesis defense. We had planned on spending a few hours together that night since she would be out of town for the next four days and I let her plan the date. She brought me to BYU's Museum of Art, but after 10 minutes it closed (there were some really interesting pieces on display too, including the I-Spy guy's stuff). Nicole was believably disappointed that her plan was cut short and we went home to regroup. That's when over a dozen of my friends shouted surprise. In the 15 minutes or so that we had been gone, they had put up decorations, got a stack of pizzas, and set up a chocolate fondue.



So props to Nicole, for a great party and an amazingly successful surprise. While this was a real accomplishment for her (keeping a secret), I don't think it's let to a permanent change. As she put it later, "Lying is hard!"



*Now mine is also a family of planning, another trip we took had weekly family planning meetings for a year with us kids managing the "Vacation Fund" and having a vote as to hotels and destinations.