Thursday, April 20, 2006

The Truth About Pittsburgh

As I mentioned in an earlier post, operation SNOW MY MOM was a huge success. My brother has been bugging me to come and visit him in Pittsburgh pretty much since he moved there two years ago. "We are just so busy" was starting to sound pretty lame, so we decided to go ahead and visit for a long weekend. However, my brother suggested an interesting wrinkle to the plan. What if we were to take our mom, and not tell her beforehand that she was going. We've never done anything like this to her before, but we couldn't imagine that she wouldn't be happy about the plan. Therefore, we set out to be sneaky. Many people helped us to get her the day off of work, make airline and car reservations, take care of her pets, and create diversions so she wouldn't know what was really going on. Several people told her lies, both small and large, but lying is actually pretty fun when it is for entirely good purposes.

On Thursday I asked her to go out to dinner with several of us to celebrate the end of my pro cert program (it's not really over, but close!). We went out to a nice restaurant, had pleasant conversation and a good dinner, and then we told her that we wanted to get dessert somewhere else. Everyone was being very vague and cagey by that point because we were all afraid of giving something away. We started driving down South, and I was wondering when she would say "what the heck is going on!". However, she was very trusting (it probably helped that we would never lie to her normally, so what reason would she have to be suspicious) and she didn't say anything until we were at the airport.

Once we all got out and the friend with the car drove off, she was pretty well aware that something was up. This was the moment of truth, would she be annoyed with us for springing this on her without any warning at all? No, of course not. She seemed very happy and very excited by the whole idea (although I could tell she did worry for just a moment about having someone else do her packing). We got tickets, passed through security, and boarded our plane without a single hitch. The actual time in Pittsburgh was great too, but that is another story (maybe one that M will put on his blog?). Over all, the surprise went beautifully, but I don't think we'll ever get away with another one quite as easily.

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