Happy Birthday Dad!

(This is going to be a long one…buckle up and hold on for the ride!)

We had a surprise birthday party for my dad on October 11. No, your eyes are not failing you, I said October! And I am just now getting around to blogging it! YIKES!! It has been more than a little crazy around here the last few months! But we are happy to say we survived it all and have finally downloaded all the birthday pictures!

The whole family came home for the weekend. We all had various excuses for being back, but we knew all of us being back and no mention of dad’s birthday was the white elephant in the room. I quickly went into damage control and decided to have a “pre-surprise party, surprise party” ☺ We went and bought a cake and had everyone go to his brother’s house where we came out with cake, screamed HAPPY BIRTHDAY and gave him his gifts. It worked like a charm because he totally bought it, hook, line and sinker….SCORE!

The next day was the big party! Here he is driving to find everyone waiting for him…

It was a costume party of sorts. We called it a “Where’s Waldo” party and everyone had to dress up like him. Basically that means wearing camouflage, mesh shorts, graphic t-shirt or more camouflage. Check this out….you can’t make this up…the above is what he really wore that day! Camo hat and graphic tee. Hehehe!

I’ll admit it, dad is an easy target and he is often the brunt of many jokes. I won’t go into all the dad stories here, but please ask me next time, we’ll have story time. ☺

I think this next set-up was a little dig at his hunting skills. They found the Christmas deer in the shed and gathered up as many arrows as they could find. This little number welcomed him to the house. :)


He has this slight obsession with flash lights, carabineers, and fanny packs. (Yes, I said it, fanny packs!!!) Check out the fanny pack I found in his camo closet! It’s practically a body bag, it turned into Punk’s house for the night! I’m going to say it again, you can’t make this up! I was nearly reduced to tears laughing so hard after I found it!


Notice Laura’s carabineer necklace! We searched the house high and low to find every carabineer we could. It was hysterical!

Uncle Kirk was in charge of the margarita machine all night. Whoa, with him in charge, the night went blurry quickly! ☺

This was the best outfit of the night… (I have no idea how Uncle Kirk ended up with the tablecloth shirt by the end of the night…but he’s modeling it in this picture).

I couldn’t figure out why he wore a tablecloth….until I asked and this is what I found out. (are you ready, this is a good one!). It was one of his co-workers and he said that dad wears this red and white shirt to work (apparently more than he should!) and they have nick-named it his table cloth shirt! Of course we had to go find it and bring it out for the party.

Check out the evidence I captured here!! Yep, it went a tiny bit out of control (I told you, the margarita machine never stopped) and people decided it would be a great idea to TP the trees in the back yard. Oh my, yes, these are all grown adults!

If you’ve hung on this long, I’m impressed! There’s the party in a nutshell! Thank you everyone who came and made it SO much fun! And thank you Kirk and Patty for hosting the impromptu pre-surprise party! Whew, it worked perfectly!