40 Years and sort of a long post :)

Thanksgiving, shopping, 60th surprise birthday party, basketball practices and games, church, and a surprise 40th anniversary party for my parents = a busy couple of weeks.

Thanksgiving was wonderful.

Shopping was uneventful.

The 6oth surprise birthday party was for my father-in-law and turned into a very late night 3am to be exact.

Action's basketball team won their first skills competition in basketball ~ must have to do with the coaching (yes, hubby is his coach ~ Ha!)

Sassy's basketball team lost their first game, but Sassy played some mighty good defense and ended up with 2 fouls and 1 illegal contact call.

The surprise 40th Anniversary party ~ well, that was for my parents!

40 years.

Remarkable.

Here's how it went down.....

Since myself and my 4 siblings are scattered about, we don't all get together very often at the same time.  So we definitely knew if we could all make it that would be a surprise in and of itself.

My sister rented out a room at a great restaurant and started sneaking pictures from my parents house so she could create a slide show of their 40 years together.

I got the evites sent out.  All of my Dad's brothers and his sister live quite a distance from my parents. 2 out of 3 said they were coming.  Both my mom's brother, who lives out of state and sister (who lives minutes from my parents) as well as her 2 kids and their family/significant replied they would also be in attendance.  Every thing was going perfectly.

I decided to make a replica of their wedding cake.  Keep in mind their wedding cake was small :)  Their actual wedding was small and intimate to begin with and made even smaller due to a December blizzard.

I made this "white wedding" (cupcakes) cake that I pinned on pinterest awhile ago as well as my favorite buttercream frosting ~ both I had also made for Smiley's 3rd birthday. They had a simple cake topper of a cross with intertwined rings which I recreated out of gum paste.

My friend E, who is simply fabulous came over on Friday to help me with the decorating.  Ok, fine... she did basically all of the decorating.  She's taken classes and is so good.  I can honestly say I don't do much, if any piping and would just have made a mess of the cake!

We had one picture to go by.  And it was a over flashed picture from the 70's (look for it at the end of this post).  A little difficult so we just went with what we saw.

The day of the party arrived.  A ice and snow storm had hit the area of my Uncle and one of my brothers and they were not able to make it.  Bummer.

My other brother, his wife and sons, my sister, her husband and son, as well as my family met about a block away from my parents house.  We gave all of the grandkids balloons, flowers and treats to carry up to the door and they piled into my vehicle.  My parents thought my husband and I were coming back to town for my father in laws 60th b-day party (which had actually taken place the weekend before) so they were expecting us to swing by.  When we pulled up all of the grandkids ran up to the door and yelled "Happy Anniversary"  when my mom opened the door.  To say the least my parents were surprised!

We hung out, decorated their house for Christmas and told them we had dinner reservations at 6:30.

Hubby and I left early ~ we had to get the cake there!  AND everyone else was showing up at 6 to surprise them.

We got all set up and word came that my parents had arrived.  We braced ourselves to surprise them.  And that they were!  My mom mentioned that there were probably more people there than had made it to their actual wedding due to the blizzard.  (I'm not sure I believe her though, but it was probably close).

She thought the cake was beautiful and less crooked than the one they had at their wedding reception and mentioned we got the colors just right!  I even made them cut the cake and exchange bites. :)

The slide show my sister had made was fabulous.

And the rest of the weekend was filled with laughter, family, memories and smiles ~ lots of smiles as we finally were able to get family pictures taken (another part of their surprise).  We had not had family pictures taken since I was a sophomore in college and they were for the church directory.

Ugly.... very ugly!  I can't wait to see the new ones!

Anyway, happy 40th to my parents!