Jared's 30th Surprise Party

Ha Ha! I got him! It's not easy to surprise him. He admits (and I admit to noticing) that he was trying to ignore that his birthday was coming and not ask me any questions so that if I WAS trying to surprise him he would have less chance of finding out. I did not even tell the boys (though I REALLY wanted to) because I knew they would tell something.
I had the boys spend the night at their grandparents on Thurs and their Aunt watched them all day Fri. I had taken over crock pots of soup to cook at her house in case he came home early (couldn't make up an explanation for all that soup!) I got all the party supplies and food together in a basket in the garage and covered it up (in case he came home) and cleaned the house! My plan was to pick up the cake, take it to Angela's and then take the boys to meet Jared and some friends for dinner after he got off work. I kept checking online to make sure he was not off work and then he called and said he thought he'd get off and he wanted to come home so we could take one car into town tonight. Made things trickier but what could I do. So I called Angela immediately and she got the boys ready and them and all their stuff outside playing so he wouldn't come in and see all the soup (though we had an explanation prepared). I had already given her my costco card just in case so after we got the boys she went to pick that up then come to our house and set everything up. (she did a GREAT job! Couldn't have done it without her) There were several things that he thought were weird throughout the day but didn't connect to anything happening. For one, people at work kept telling him happy birthday. That was my fault. I should have mentioned in the invite that Fri was NOT his actual birthday but I forgot. Then he thought I was weird on the phone (I was trying not to commit to anything he said and have him make all the decisions all while franticly trying to think of all the options of how to change things depending on what he did. He also told me later he thought the house wasn't as clean as he would have thought if I was working on intense cleaning projects all day (excuse me...what? :) ) so putting that together with the fact that I wasn't specifying what I was doing when he asked he thought I surely wasn't working on cleaning projects (so.... what did he think I was doing and why didn't he try to find out?.... men!) People kept calling me to tell me Jared had left work so I turned off my phone and even lied to my mother in law telling her it was the wrong number because Jared was RIGHT next to me! he didn't hear anything else though so we were good. We met our friends Lance and Carisa (along with Carisa's friend) for dinner and before I got in their Carisa's friend said "there's the birthday boy!" (she knew there was a surprise party but this was again my fault for not specifying that that was not his actual birthday) Carisa saw a look cross Jared's face (and Jared told me later that in that moment he thought there were too many seats at the table and this might be a surprise party - but of course that didn't happen and he forgot about it) so Carisa made some comment about how they were just talking about how many of their friends are currently turning 30. Nice save Carisa! She totally saved it!
I (especially) took my time with dinner. When we left Jared decided we should stop at the store and get dessert - so we did. This whole time I'm texting with Angela to keep her posted, etc. and Jared did begin to wonder who in the world I kept texting so I had to chill with that. Angela wanted me to call her phone discreetly when we got close so she could have everyone completely ready. I misunderstood and thought she wanted me to let her know when we were close... but she wanted me to let her know RIGHT before we arrived. So people were quiet in the garage for quite a while. Oops! We were driving the van so Angela thought to have everyone stand along the back of the garage so noone would be killed by Jared :) This turned out to be a very wise plan. When the door opened Jared told me later he was trying to figure out why there were people in our garage (um...if you didn't know it was a surprise party then why weren't you CONCERNED about this? :) ) After thinking through several things he figured it out.
We had a fun night. I didn't take a ton of pictures but I'll show you a few. I also tried to video the surprise but had the camera on in my purse for a minute before. It's not a great video but it gets the point accross :)