I really love throwing parties.  I don’t care who they are for but when they are for the family it gets to be even more fun. Last year we threw a party for my mom-in-law.  She was super excited to get into the retirement theme and wanted a special day.  So she let us know that this day was going to be special and that she wanted the whole family there for a day.  She planned out the entire day hour by hour and wanted to spend it sharing all parts of her life with us.  Now in reality it was a bit boring, but it was also very special.  Taking the time to learn from someone who has many more years of living is important and a wise move.  Now she loves treats and we decided to go to the store and pick up her favorite candy boxes and set up our own little surprise for her.

Luckily, I have a great wife who loves to plan and do these kinds of things.  She set the whole thing up.  Our goal was to add a surprise to her special day and with that, we wanted to throw a party at the end.  We planned for weeks to find all of her favorite foods and colors.  We implemented really cool birthday gifts that were all themed.  The main theme was to take her favorite candy boxes of almond joys and make the theme flamingo.  This was a rather crazy task because ti meant everything had to be pink and yet coconut-themed.  It was very colorful and cool.

It was my mom’s day so we let her do her thing and when we had time to sneak away we did.  We took those breaks and instantly made the basement a super special place for a surprise.  The first goal was to fill it with balloons.  So on the first break, we went down and locked the doors.  We then proceeded to blow up several hundred balloons.  This was breathtaking as you might imagine, and we made some crazy fun decorations with them.

The balloons falling from the ceiling were pretty cool.  This made a bed on the ceiling with a pull string.  The idea was when she went down the stairs we would pull the string and the sheet which was taped to the ceiling and filled with balloons would fall.  We put about 50 ballons in the sheet and packing taped it to the ceiling.  We also used scissors to cut the string to the right length in order to have a good pull.  This took some time and many strips of tape to get it to stay in the correct position.  We had to use the pinata and it was a cute sloth.  It was so much fun for her.

We filled the pinata with her favorite treat of almond joys and provided a nice bat.  It was a flamingo pinata and she loved it.  Then we taped balloons across the ceiling and had all her gifts surrounded by a giant set of balloons.  It was a pretty awesome setup and by the time the fourth break happened we finished it up.  Finally, it was our time to surprise her and it was incredible.