Blog/December 2011/Dec 16th

Dec 16th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive! This week marked Sarah's twentieth birthday; she celebrated with various groups of her friends, several times during the week. But Esther and I had decided a while back we would throw a surprise party for her. You know, where the victim has no idea the party is going to occur? Easier said than done, particularly when all of you live in close proximity, you rarely leave the house and you don't have contact information for the guests.

The first step we needed to take was to get in contact with her various friends. We thought we were being very clever when we utilized Facebook to hunt them down and "message" them. Well, guess what? Very few of them responded to FB messages -- almost a total waste of time. So then we knew we had to get a hold of her phone and pull her friends' numbers. But she has the @#$@! device with her almost all the time -- how could we get it long enough to do any good? We waited patiently until she took a shower, and then sneaked into her room, hunted down her phone, scooped out the information we needed -- all the while in constant fear we would be discovered -- and stealthily beat it out of there before she got out of the shower. I tell you, Esther and I are not cut out for burglary work!

So we sent SMS messages to a number of her friends, and got almost immediate responses -- yay! The plan was afoot ... now, how were we going to get our daughter to cooperate? Not an easy task, that! We conscripted one of her close friends to take Sarah shopping the evening of the event. But Sarah -- oh, Sarah! -- made other plans and threw a wrench in the works. So we conscripted another of her friends to distract her at the appropriate time. But Sarah -- OH, SARAH!! -- came down with a touch of something, and stayed home the entire day of the party. Blast! Esther had planned on staying home that day to take care of the preparations, now what was she supposed to do?

At this point, we both thought Sarah had figured out what was going on and was purposefully thwarting our plans. But we forged ahead anyway, figuring we should throw the party anyway since people were going to come. Esther had told Sarah we were going to have "birthday cake" on shabbat, so she wouldn't be surprised when she made it on Thursday. But as the day progressed and the further preparations were being made, it became a bit more difficult to find a way to explain to Sarah why so much food was being prepared.

As it turned out, Sarah had no clue we were throwing her a party. She wondered why dinner was taking so long to show up, but figured it was just "one of those days". She wondered at the large bowl of cut vegetables, but then figured "Daddy likes to eat veggies". She wondered at our neighbor and her girls showing up, but accepted that they just "came to borrow something". She wondered at the junk-food (chips, cola) we never buy, but figured that maybe her mama just wanted some. Some more people came, and were tucked into a (tiny) alcove by the entrance to the kitchen, while Sarah was in the next room -- and she didn't figure anything was amiss until I walked in with a bouquet of balloons! Then she finally got that there was a surprise party going on. So despite her best inadvertent efforts to thwart our plans, we emerged victorious. Happy birthday, Sarah!

She is still in shock that we threw her a surprise party -- but her shock is no match for ours that we were actually able to pull it off. During the party we got Daniela on Skype, so she participated virtually; and shocked her sister by informing her she too was in on the event. None of her friends ratted us out, we're very happy to report!

This shabbat two of Sarah's friends will be staying with us. On the menu: steak and potatoes, sautéed mushrooms, onion soup, beet salad, salatim, chard pashtida, chili-con-carne, chocolate-raspberry birthday cake, spice cake.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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