Happy Birthday Katie!!!

What do you do for a 20th Birthday? When in doubt, plan a surprise.

It didn't start out as a surprise party way back in August. You see our buddy Tracy wanted to go see Mama Mia! when he was in Las Vegas but couldn't get tickets. So I started looking on the internet to see if the touring company would be anywhere near Seattle. Low and behold, they would be hitting town in December. Tracy & Robert invited us to go with them, and it was a matter of figuring out when Katie would be out of school. I never told her in case it wasn't a go. Then in October I caught wind that Katie was plotting to get tickets with Jessica to surprise me. She's so sweet. So the plan was born. We'd all get tickets together on Katie's b-day & surprise her. We are so tricky & Katie so easy to surprise.




Next the emails started to fly about where to have dinner. The group vote was to go to the Cheesecake Factory. Now to get Katie to decide that she wanted to go to the Cheesecake Factory in Seattle for her birthday. So I suggested that we spend her b day shopping in Seattle and she could pick out her own gifts and then we would go out for dinner. At first, she thought no. After driving home from Ashland the day before she thought that she wouldn't want to get in a car. (My thought was that I would make sure that there was no food in the house and to avoid starving she would have to get in the car with me & I could then drag her to Seattle for dinner by force) Luckily she changed her mind & thought it would be fun. She wasn't sure about the Cheesecake Factory, but I whined. Since birthday's are about dessert & I was going to actually have dessert, we should go to the best dessert place in town.





Then the really tricky part. Katie wants to go see Pride and Prejudice & it plays in Tacoma at 9:15pm. She called Jessica to see if she wanted to go with us. Of course she said yes & she would call Jenn & Sarah & invite them along. So this meant we had to head for dinner around 5:45 (our reservations were for 5:30, so everyone would be there and be seated by 5:45 when we arrived). This also gave me a good excuse to call Jessica around dinner time to check on the movie plans.




So as we are walking to the Cheescake Factory, I call Jessica & they haven't been seated, SO STALL. Ok, I started walking really slow. Let's enjoy the lights & Christmas decorations, Katie. Let's go into Niketown and look at shoes Katie... But alas by 6 Katie was starving & they weren't seated yet. So we went into a very crowded restaurant & Katie was very surprised and thrilled!



Dinner was very good, but no room for dessert so we made a plan to return after the show and eat some more. Which gave us an opportunity to embarass her twice! So our fabulous dinner waiter, Scott brought Katie a b day sundae after dinner & the whole staff sang to her. Then our wonderful dessert waiter, Willie brought her another sundae & the whole staff sang again! The show was GREAT. I think even non ABBA fans (Rob) would get a kick out of how they worked the songs into the story and it all worked. We bounced in our seats, sang to our neighbors and for the 3 song encore stood and danced and sang at the top of our lungs. Fun, Fun, Fun!

Now remember, mark your calendar for Dec. 17th next year. It falls on a Sunday & it's the BIG 21!!! And as I hear plans being tossed about it might be a smart thing to plan on taking Dec. 18th off as a vacation day. See you then!