Grishny’s Journal

Lookit me, I’m halfway to seventy! Now I just have to do the other half plus a week to see the year 2045! How cool is that?

My email inbox was flooded with messages from fellow Facebook users this morning. That’s new; when I turned 25 and even 30 I could probably count on two hands the number of people who wished me a happy birthday on the day. Modern times!

This is the first birthday since I turned 29 that I’ve been in Dayton, Ohio with my whole family on my birthday. After we moved to Pennsylvania, we always traveled on Thanksgiving or other holidays, but never for Christmas. This year would have been the same, but then this little wedding thing happened and changed all our plans! We would have come here for Thanksgiving this year, and probably taken a full week, but instead we used two of the vacation days to come for Sarah Beth’s wedding two weekends before Turkey Day.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to use the remaining two days, until I was talking to Mom on the phone a few weeks before the wedding and she was bemoaning the possibility of having no one at her house for Christmas morning. At the time, Gwen and Dan were planning to be in Canada with Dan’s sister, and Sarah Beth and Matthew were going to be visiting his grandparents in Chicago. So I told my mom that she and Dad should come to York for Christmas, but I knew that probably wasn’t going to happen, since Mom always hosts Christmas dinner for the whole Dayton Kanost clan on the afternoon of December 25th.

So I emailed my father and suggested that if they couldn’t come to see us, we would come visit them for the holidays, and try to surprise Mom. Surprising Mom isn’t easy. We brought Gwen, and eventually all of the Ernsts and Sarah Beth and Matthew in on the secret as well. Yesterday, we drove out to Ohio from PA and came straight to Gwen’s house, arriving around 4:30. We parked two blocks away and around two corners from her house so our car wouldn’t be spotted. Gwen invited everyone over for dinner, Mom included, and we practiced surprising her twice, first when Sarah Beth and Matthew arrived and again when Dad showed up. Gwen had rearranged her living room, and had Jonathan and (our) Matthew crouch down on the couch while Amy and I sat on the floor, so that anyone coming down the steps into the room couldn’t see us until they walked over past the couch.

Sarah Beth and Matt, and Dad as well, saw us right away, and pretended to act surprised even though they knew we were going to be there, and we were ready and in our places when Mom arrived straight from work around ten after six. Gwen had Jake sitting at the computer in the corner of the living room and his job was to call Grandma to come look at what he was doing so she would have to cross the room and walk past the sofa. It worked, and she walked right past us without even seeing us. Everyone else was sitting around the room and grinning, and Mom turned around and said “why is everyone laughing?” And still she didn’t see us! She looked right at Gwen, who was standing behind the couch where we were, and then finally glanced down and saw us.

A split second and a double-take later, Mom was screaming, running around the room and waving her hands wildly in the air, laughing and crying and then hugging. It was the best Christmas surprise ever! Dan had set up his video camera to catch the whole event on tape, and I hope to get a copy to post here eventually.