A surprise birthday gathering for Anthony

Have you ever tried to surprise your hubby with a small gathering of friends for his birthday?

I hadn't. 
Until a couple weeks ago. 

Anthony's birthday was November 24th, which is always around Thanksgiving. Translation: everybody's reeeeal busy

About a week before his birthday I decided to try to throw together a low key gathering (not a party) at our house. I knew if we went to a restaurant we wouldn't get to have enough convo and we couldn't take our time visiting. So our house became the logical gathering place. 

But that meant I had a lot of stuff to do. And I had to keep on the DL down low because if I did too much, he'd get suspicious. 

Oh boy.

So I sent the email to some folks we used to church with. Some of the musicians and singers from our old church. We hadn't seen em all together at all since we left that church. It was a stretch, but amazingly they were all available to come celebrate with us. 

My next obstacle was the house. I had to get my Christmas stuff up AND clean AND get food stuffs for the folks.

Got the decorating and some of the cleaning done without making Anthony suspicious. But I gave up on the food piece - there was just no way to pull that off, so the night before the party I had to tell him. He was cool with it thankfully.

We had chili, buffalo chicken dip, bbq bacon wrapped smokies, and some other snackie snacks. And his cake was a lemon cake with lemon icing. Birthday boy's request. Easy enough! 

Even though I said no gifts, Danny gave Anthony a funny shirt

Yeah, that's a kangaroo bustin a sag sayin Whas sup?

There was some serious lookin convo goin on here. . . heavy stuff looks like 

Brandon is a little drummer boy... BW is what Anthony always calls him... 

these two clowns can't even take a pic together without being goofy

These two lovely ladies are two of the greatest gals! And I miss singing with them. But we still talk and email and text and hang out, so it's all good. Love them! 

Riley and Drew played really well together even though they're about 4 years apart and didn't really know each other

This was the first time in the 5 years we've lived in our house that a kid used the stairs as a slide

You know I had to have some one on one time with this little dude...        
               \\  oh.my.goodness.he.is.a.sweetie.pie.  //

So that's pretty much it. 

At the end of the night when the house was quiet cuz all our friends had gone home Anthony said he was exhausted. He said he was tired from hosting. LOL But he said he enjoyed it. So that's all that matters.