This year was a special one for my family. It was the 65th birthday of my mother in law. This was a big deal to her because it was a feeling of accomplishment and wisdom in her mind. So she let us know that this day was going to be special and that she wanted the whole family there for a day. She planned out the entire day hour by hour and wanted to spend it sharing all parts of her life with us. Now in reality it was a bit boring, but it was also very special. Taking the time to learn from someone who has many more years of living is important and a wise move. So we also wanted to make a few plans of our own to surprise her and make it a special day and with her love of special candy boxes, we wanted to incorporate them into the party.
This was an exciting time that all of her kids and my wife loved being able to plan for. Our goal was to add a surprise into her special day and with that we wanted to throw a party at the end. We planned for weeks finding all of her favorite foods and colors. We implemented really cool birthday gifts that were all themed. The main theme was to take her favorite candy boxes of almond joys and make the theme flamingo. This was a rather crazy task because ti meant everything had to be pink and yet coconut themed. And that is what we decided to do.
During the special day, she had planned out she ha breaks set aside. We took those breaks and instantly made the basement a super special place for a surprise. The first goal was to fill it with balloons. So on the first break, we went down and locked the doors. We then proceeded to blow up several hundred balloons. This was breathtaking as you might imagine, but they were all pink and we created some cool scenery with them.
We first grabbed a sheet and tape it to the ceiling. This made a bed on the ceiling with a pull string. The idea was when she went down the stairs we would pull the string and the sheet which was taped to the ceiling and filled with balloons would fall. We put about 50 ballons in the sheet and packing taped it to the ceiling. We also used scissors to cut the string to the right length in order to have a good pull. This took some time and many strips of tape to get it to stay in the correct position. Then we taped up a pinata to a basement ceiling beam.
We filled the pinata with her favorite treat of almond joys and provided a nice bat. It was a flamingo pinata and she loved it. Then we taped ballons across the ceiling and had all her gifts surrounded by a giant set of 65-year-old balloons. It was a pretty awesome setup and by the time the 4th break happened we finished it up. We had her walk down after dinner and surprised her with a fun celebration at the end of a wisdom-filled day. I highly suggest giving this a shot for your family as it was really fun.
