Party Picture Barf

It's only taken me a few days to get out of my blogging habit. I'm not so sure that I want to start it back up again because I've realized just how many other things I really should be doing instead of spending time on the computer. With that said, this is really the only way anything in our life gets documented . . . so here goes another post.

Here are just a few pictures from Phil's party, along with some brief commentary. I didn't get permission from anybody to post their pictures, so I decided to use pictures of people who are either very forgiving or who I can take. If you see your picture on here, I'll let you decide which category you fall into.

These first few pictures show our arrival. In the first one I am backing into the room, with Noah in my arms (to keep him from running ahead and ruining the surprise) and Phil is following. At this point, he still thought he was at the church for a welcome home reception for a recently returned missionary in our ward.

I think it was right about here that Phil realized that the 150 or so people who were staring and shouting "Surprise!" at him weren't there for the missionary.

Phil's friend Paul stepped right up with the first "you're officially old" joke.

Later that evening, this is how Noah described the entrance to one of our guests: "And we were going to the church and mom picked me up because I was running and we opened the door and all the people yelled 'Surprise!' to me and then all the people singed 'Happy Birthday to Noah!!' I'm so happy!"

My cute boys!

The buffet table was AMAZING thanks to my equally AMAZING friends who worked their guts out to put it together. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have gotten a picture of it, so this is the best I could do. My bro. in-law Kendall has a nice sampling on his plate.

The aforementioned friends, minus one (look for her below). They are the reason this happened at all. If left to my own devices, Phil would likely have gotten a lame card and it probably would have been late. I have good intentions, it's just that I tend to have a hard time realizing those intentions if nobody is there to urge me forward, or drag me along, depending on the circumstances and the degree to which I find myself distracted.

Why sugarcoat it? 40 SUCKS!

Some of the students with whom I used to work, and whom I miss terribly, and with whom Phil now has the pleasure of working. (Can you tell that I am showing off my fairly recently acquired knowledge of the proper use of "whom"? Up until just a few months ago it was always pretty much a guess. I feel liberated!) Notice Noah in the middle of the group - the camera lens always seems to find him.

My nephew, Jackson. He looked so cute with his little faux-hawk that I had to take a picture, or two. He just wasn't giving me the smile that I wanted . . .

Convict Jack "Special" Jack

Please, Jack, just relax and gimme a cute smile . . .

We weren't quite there, so I tried one more. We ended up with Evil Jack, and I gave up.

And finally . . . Sam! The reason she wasn't in the picture up above is because she was running non-stop all night. In fact, I think this was the first time in about 48 hours that she stopped moving - back at my house, about midnight, after everything was cleaned up and put away.