Ben's Birthday!

For those of you who know me best, you know that I'm not very good at celebrating things. Well, this year I decided that since we weren't around family anymore I needed to make a special day of it, so I carefully planned out some fun things for Ben's birthday.

First I'll break down what I had planned, then tell you how it played out! First, I planned on bringing cupcakes to Ben's class to surprise him on his birthday. Next the kids and I went to the dollar store and I had each of the kids pick out a funny gift to give to their Dad - and we also got decorations to decorate the house with. After having Ben open his presents that evening I had planned for us to go out to dinner at a restaurant that we really liked and I had babysitting all taken care of. Sounds great, right? Well, this is how it played out . . .

I had approached Ben's professor the day before his birthday to see if it was okay for me to drop off some cupcakes in his office that he could bring out at the end of class. It wasn't difficult talking with him because his son goes to the same school that Lexi goes to and I often see him while he's dropping his son off. Anyway, I stopped him that morning and asked if it would be okay (and not a disruption) if I were to bring the cupcakes. He said it was fine, but he wanted to make sure that I was alright with that because there were 60 people in the class. Well, I told him that was no problem because I thought that he had said 16. I had this preconceived notion that Ben's classes on Thursday were smaller classes so I didn't think for one moment that he had said 60 instead of 16. In fact, my response to him was, "Oh, that's no problem at all. It's not like there are 70 or 80 in the class." He kind of gave me this weird look when I said that, but it didn't even register (until after). So that night I made 25 cupcakes and put them all in tupperware for the next day.

The next morning I had arranged for a friend of mine to drop me off at his building so that I could take it by the professor's office. The professor wasn't in, so I just left him a quick thank you note and went home. After Ben's class got out he gave me a phone call and said, "Did you mean to embarrass me?" I thought he was joking so I asked him what he was talking about. He said that when they had brought in the cupcakes and announced it was his birthday they made it sound like he had made cupcakes for his birthday and brought them in (which really embarrassed him). I asked him why he didn't give a disclaimer to correct that misconception and say that I had surprised him with them. He said the reason he didn't correct it was because he didn't know a lot of the people in the class and there were about 50 people in the class. That's when it was my turn to be embarrassed. I couldn't believe that I hadn't made enough for everybody in the class. I'm still smarting over it (a week later). His professor must think that I'm the biggest idiot! Oh well, sure makes for a funny story.

Anyway, on to the evening - after Ben had opened the kids' gifts I started to get things ready so that we could go to dinner. That was when Alexis started sniffling a ton and said that she wasn't feeling good. She then told me that she had been getting a cold all day and didn't want to go anywhere. We decided to cancel our plans to go out to eat because the family from our church that was going to watch the kids have a newborn baby and we didn't want the baby getting sick. Strike 2! We ended up getting pizza.

And to top off the day - my present for Ben didn't come in the mail until the next day - so, despite my best intentions, things didn't turn out quite how I had planned. I think that I'll go back to flying by the seat of my pants. There's always next year . . .!