SURPRISE!!!!!!

Everyone knows how life gets crazy sometimes, and for the past year that is all that mine and Chad's life has been, CRAZY!! So I decided that I wanted to do something special for Chad. I started planning about 5 months ago to take him on a trip to San Diego. There wasn't any specific reason why I chose San Diego, I was just thinking that it was close enough, but far enough away, warm, and had lots of fun things that we could do. So I started planning. First, I found out when my girls and my mom would be off track and asked her to watch my girls. Then as the months went by I slowly took a little money out of each pay check so that I could pay for the trip without Chad noticing anything (it helps that I am the one that does the finances :) ). I got the hotel, flight, car rental and everything set up. So, it was mostly a waiting game for me, which was UNBELIEVABLY hard!! My biggest thing was that I wanted it to be a surprise for Chad, so I didn't tell hardly anyone about it because I didn't want it to get back to him. I also had to set up the story so that I could make my plan work. My mom has to write down things in her planner or she will plan stuff over it, which makes sense. The only problem was that she keeps her planner out on the counter where everyone can see it so we know what is going on. Obviously this wouldn't work if there was a whole weekend where it said she was watching my kids. So, I had her put that my dad was going on a business trip that weekend. This actually helped me out because our suitcase was in storage, so I had my dad ask us, when Chad was around, if he could borrow one of our suitcases. Perfect! So I was able to go down and get the suitcase without any questions being asked. I cleared everything through Chad's boss, and then I just waited.

The night before we left I told Chad that I had cleared it through his boss, and that we were taking the next day and spending the whole day together. I told him that we just had to drop my dad off at the airport so that we could take my parents car so that my mom could have our van just in case she needed to go somewhere. I said that we had from 6:00am until midnight to do whatever we wanted to. He was pretty excited. The whole time I was just laughing inside. ha ha ha. So, the next morning we got up early to take my dad to the airport. ( I had packed our suitcase the day before and put it up in my parents room. I bought all new shampoo, toothbrushes, deoderant etc. so that he wouldn't notice that anything was missing). So we get to the airport and my dad pulls up to the curb and gets out, and I get out and Chad gets out. Chad pulls the suitcase out of the trunk and my dad says "Well, you guys have a fun time!" And gets back in the car and starts to drive away. At this point Chad is like "What??" And he looks over at me and I am like "Come on, we are going on a trip!!!" He was SO confused!! It was probably one of the best parts of the trip for me. All of my planning had paid off and he was COMPLETELY surprised! The next half hour he just kept laughing. He couldn't believe it :) Unfortunately for him since I had been holding all of this information in for 5 months he had to listen to me blabber about everything that had got us to that point :) One exciting thing that happened at the airport, I went through the full body scanner, and they thought that I was hiding something in my pants pocket, so I had to step aside and have someone come and frisk me and ask me questions like "Whats in your pocket?" I told them it was nothing, just my pocket, but they didn't seem to believe me. So I had to turn my pockets inside-out to show them. I felt like a criminal.

So, we got to San Diego at about 9:30am and we decided to go to the San Diego Zoo. I had decided before we went that I wasn't going to plan anything specific and we would just do whatever we felt like. We ended up going to the zoo, Sea World, Wild Animal Park, the beach, a bunch of little shops and much, much more. It was SO much fun to be together and forget our worries for a couple of days. I definitely feel rejuventated!

So as a recap, my plan worked and we had an AMAZING time!!! I love my husband!!!