surprise!!

so i have left yall hangin' because i have had a crazy couple of weeks. i have had a birthday surprise to plan for my hubs that was immediately followed by his week long work trip. and i didn't think i needed to broadcast for the world that i was alone with the kiddos for a week, so i just left that part out. and after a week of absolutely no time to myself, i was backed up on my blogs again. so again, i've been reading about your little lives and how fun they are and the neat things you have been doing this morning while i recover from my week long hiatus from sanity. however, some of you have been asking what i did for micah's birthday, so this is what you are getting today. first of all, there are no pictures. cause we didn't really do anything exciting, but that's pretty much how we roll. we are completely content to just hang out. we've always been that way, which may be partly what has contributed to the fact that micah and i haven't been anywhere alone together in 8...EIGHT years. eight. why? well, at first it was a work/vacation issue. yall may or may not know i'm a nurse by trade, even though my job of choice these days is wife and mama. however, when i worked full time, i worked for an internist who has an insanely busy office and the only time you could have off was if he put you in the hospital...i'm only partly kidding. but i loved my job. anyway, after that, we kept on having kiddos. and we'd get one ready to where we thought they'd stay away overnight, just to have another one. but that baby train has made it's last trip, so it was time.

on to the show...
first i wanted to get micah some kind of tickets to a sporting event for a "boy date" for his birthday. then i thought "well, that doesn't give me the opportunity to do anything with him for his birthday." so i started thinking about what would be fun for us to do. so i started thinking i'd take him to the opry. but the good shows are on saturday nights and don't start until 7:30...so that was kind of out due to the babysitting factor (i mean, who wants to get up 3 kids on a sunday morning to get them ready for church if they don't belong to ya??) so i started thinking about an "overnight date". and once i had checked all necessary calendars, i set up the getaway. and while plotting that, i called our friends the tate's (who have FINALLY moved back close to us...a day trip anyway) to see if they wanted to meet us for lunch on saturday...a "double date". thus, giving my husband what i like to call "the dating trifecta" for his birthday. a boy date, an overnight date and a double date with awesome friends that we have missed BIG TIME. and the best thing is that it was all a surprise!! yall, i had to go all covert on planning this mission. i had to delete history on the computer, not that he checks, call his mama to procure babysitting, ask friends who go to nashville a good bit (oh yeah, that's were we went) to ask about hotels and restaurants, get his brother in on the hockey game (that was the boy date. we have a minor league team here in HSV.) and ask our friends to meet us on saturday. there was texting, secret phone calls, emails...gracious. but it was sooooooo worth it. he knew we were going on a date, but that was it. i told him the first part was a surprise. so he relented and wore a blindfold for about 20 minutes of the drive...until right as we got to the TN state line. that was how i told him we were leaving the state for our date. he was surprised for sure. like i said...EIGHT YEARS!!!! oh, and since he was out of town for his actual birthday, i called the cookie company in cool springs to order his birthday cake so that it could be a surprise too. it was awesome and i'm glad that we went. hopefully we'll get to do more of those in the future!!