SURPRISE PARTY!!!!

Great news!! I received my party pictures, so I can finally tell you about Ryan's spectacular surprise party! (Warning: this might be a long post. I do not apologize.)

Ryan and I told a lot of the back story of this party in this week's podcast, so I won't recap that here, since you can find it there!

One quick note of explanation, though, is how Ryan got me to the party location. I thought I was going to our niece's birthday party to take pictures! It turned out her actual party was the next day, and I had received a fake invitation, specially made just for me!

Ryan hired a great photographer who captured the day so perfectly for me. I won't subject you to all 150ish photos I have, but hopefully you can get a feel for the day through these!

First, of course, there was the actual surprise!

Because Belle is my favorite princess, they built the whole party around that movie. Roses, books, teacups...and Belle herself was present and accounted for!

Oh yes. That's a photo booth back there! He seriously thought of everything. He even made prints of four themes of photos from my life (Family and Friends, 40 Years of Bekah, The Many Faces of Bekah, and Bekah/Ryan) that he displayed on the walls!

So. Many. Friends. came to surprise me! And I knew for all the faces in the room, there were many more who couldn't come because of distance, other obligations, or maybe even Ryan not being able to reach them! (After all, he has no social media whatsoever. I was impressed he found the ones he did!) I won't go through every single picture taken, but here are a few!

All the babies I witnessed taking their very first breaths on this planet...no longer babies! This is one of my many framilies. I love them so!

Ryan's Grandpa and Aunt Ruthie Woo Hoo! :)

Our friends Mike and Nancy: we met them when we went to church in Marion, but Mike actually helped my dad start his radio program fifty years ago, so there's a long family history of friendship here!

More of our framily - our friend Shawn, who is basically another brother to Ryan and one of the best friends two people could have!

Kristin was one of the few people at our wedding! She has been present for so many huge moments in my life (the good ones and the hard ones) and I was so honored she came to celebrate with me! Her husband couldn't make it, but their daughter was with her, and it was fun to have these two there!

Our dear Wayne and Shari, who are far better to us than either of us deserve! They trekked quite a distance to be there!

Merle and Becky are part of our small group, and Becky had two parties to attend that day, so she missed the surprise part of mine. Barb took this picture while I showed them the video of the surprise.

I took pictures at Faith's party two months earlier, and then she came to mine! People are still asking if we're sisters, even though we don't have matching hair anymore!

I do think Lynnette and I passed for sisters this time. We've been friends that long now. We look alike! I was FLOORED to see them in the room. They spent hours upon hours upon hours in the car to be here for this!

And of course our family worked SO HARD to help Ryan with this! My in-laws Allen and Nita helped with setup, tear-down, and everything in between!

My in-laws Gary and Lynn! (I saw Ryan's dad the day before my party and wondered why he seemed eager to avoid me. He told me later he was terrified to talk to me because he was afraid he'd say something!)

My parents! Mom worked really hard to help with setup and tear-down too!

A few random party shots...

And can we just pause to talk about the amazing CAKE Ryan got?

ISN'T THAT SO BEAUTIFUL!!?!?!?!

What an amazing and wonderful day - and I am so grateful for ALL the hard work Ryan (and his team) put into it!

All photo credit on this page goes to the incredible Barb Sanders at Creationfoto Photography. She is wonderful!

My First Tennis Match

I promise I'm not avoiding telling you about my fun party! I just thought it might be more fun to share when I have pictures! :)

Meanwhile, I had a Bekahland first recently: I attended my first tennis match!

I've told you before about my friend Pat. He's the one Ryan and I are walking with in the kidney walk this summer. He's had two kidney transplants in his life, and we are walking in support of that!

Well, Pat's a tennis coach at our old high school, and can you believe I'd never been to a match? Friend fail. :( I'd actually not been to a tennis match ever, including my own high school days. A few weeks ago, one of our friends suggested we go watch one of the matches. And even better? We should go as a fan club! Posters!

OKAY!!!

It was the first truly amazing weather day we had this spring, and I was so excited!

We met up at the school and he was definitely surprised! He's impossible to embarrass, even with neon signs. But his team thought it was pretty funny that these two strange women showed up as a coach's fan club!

We knew NOTHING about tennis, and we quickly learned it's more of a quiet sport. Neither of us are overly accused of being quiet sorts of people, so this was a challenge for us!

The girls that played on the courts right in front of us were really good, so we had exciting matches to watch, and the team won!

 It was fun to watch Pat in coaching action!

And it was fun to catch up with high school friends, too! (One of our classmates has a daughter on the team, so we sat with her and had a great time talking with her.)

We had so much fun! We enjoyed being groupies, and when we were done, I stopped by to see my friend Amber, and we went out for ice cream!

65 Months, Showers, and Parties!

In lieu of party pictures (today) I am offering you Ryan's rendition of how he did this ah-mazing party! Peek behind the scenes at his mad skills!

Listen here!

It's another catch-up kind of day here on the old blogaroo. So much has been happening, but I didn't get to tell you about it in the middle of all the I Choose You posts!

So here are a few glimpses of the things I missed telling you about!

First, Ryan and I celebrated our 65th monthiversary! You know how I feel about giving those the recognition they deserve! It was "just a normal work day" for us, but we squeezed in a little fun! (And I didn't know at the time that Ryan was totally preoccupied with the party.)

(I told him I feel like I look forty in this one! I blame the sun and the furrowed brow.)

We are participating in a choir program at our church (well, Ryan is) and there was a meeting for it that night, so we went to that! Sneaky choir selfie!

And on the way home? Coffee date!

We had a fun day, even if it was a busy day!

Now don't get scared by the "showers" part of the post. BABY showers!! :) Ryan's sister is having a baby this summer, and her baby shower bash was the last Sunday in April! Rather than doing a bunch of little showers with a bunch of different groups, they did one big party! And it was fun! Here are a few pictures from that day!

SUPER cute decorations. As you can see, Ryan's family does parties very well!

 Ryan and Aunt Ruthie Woo Hoo!

 We selfied this with the big camera. I was pretty impressed with us!

 This is one loved baby!

 Bre and Andrew! :)

 Ryan had a camera too. :)

So that was a fun day!! :) 

And then this past weekend, in addition to my party, our niece had a birthday party too! You guys, I took over six hundred pictures at that party. It was insane. I will keep my ones below pretty brief and generic because there were kids there I don't know, but it was a fun party!!!

So basically we have eaten a lot of cake in the last week! But it has been oh so much fun!

It All Started on a Friday Night

This post is taking an entirely different direction than I thought it was going to go, but that's okay! More fun this way!

Several weeks ago, I got an email from a church north of Fort Wayne asking if I could speak at their women's dinner this year. I was happy to do that and began working hard on my message for the evening. Ryan, of course, was planning to come with me, take pictures, run my Power Point...all of it!

Well, a few days before the event, he told me he had bad news: he wasn't going to be able to come with me after all. He said he had something that he had to do for my birthday gift and that was the only night it was going to work out to do it, and I didn't even ask a single question about it.

See, here's the thing. I love birthdays, and big birthdays are especially huge for me. So I told him I did not care for a minute what he did for my birthday, but I just wanted something special. And I didn't want to know what he was planning, because I'm not a spoilsport that way. So once I found out he needed the night off for birthday related reasons, I gave him my blessing and called the conversation done. I didn't want to know more!

So Friday afternoon, I packed up the car and drove to the church, which was about two hours away. I had a gorgeous day to travel and found it with no problem.

I don't have many pictures of the evening, because my photographer was on birthday duty! I didn't know any of the ladies at the church (other than the one I'd been corresponding with about the evening) and felt kind of odd asking strangers to take pictures for me, so I just have a couple of quick shots I grabbed before everything began.

We had a great time, though. Delicious food, great fellowship, and the ladies were kind and attentive as I talked. I hope they got a nugget or two to take with them!

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I did not know that my gift was a surprise party and Ryan stayed home to actually assemble the party! WHAT?!?!!??

He and a whole team of my friends and family got together at the church where his family hosts all their parties, to put up a tribute to my almost 40 years on this planet! (I still have a week left, so I'm still 39.5.) Oh my goodness. They all worked so hard. So many decorations, so many details, so much work! (I felt appropriately guilty about all their hard work, but when I found out about it, I also thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it!)

I can't wait to tell you more about it! (We'll be talking about it on the podcast tomorrow, so definitely come back for that!) Ryan went all out and hired a photographer to take pictures for me, so it may be a while before I have those, but I can still tell you the story soon...and then I'll show you the pictures when I get them!

And that's the tale of a Friday night in Shafferland!