Surprise!

Hi. Amanda here.

So early last week Jared told me he had a surprise for me. It was scheduled to begin sometime on Friday evening and go through Saturday. Immediately I thought that maybe he was going to be taking me somewhere on an overnight trip; our last one, just the two of us, before the Bean arrives. That wasn't it. Apparently he gave me some clues. I was just clueless. See if you can make any sense of his three clues. Please keep in mind that he didn't tell me that these were the clues - he just did them and hoped I'd catch on:

1. He bought tulips and put them in a Salmon Falls Pottery vase.

2. Our last blog entry was entitled "I love lilacs"

3. He said he wanted to make an 'Adirondack' dinner....or something.

Well, I had no idea, but last night around 7:15 my best friend Andrea showed up in our driveway. It was the BEST surprise! I hadn't seen her since October when we went to see 'Wicked' in Boston. We had a really great time. First we took her to Governor's for dinner, then we sat by the fire and caught up. Andrea is a professional voice teacher and performer and I really like hearing about her concerts and performances that take place in the Boston area. Today we got up, had a great breakfast made by Jared, walked to Hillman's for some treats and we also made a trip to Agway (where we both got some bulbs to plant this year) and finally Big G's for a sandwich.

The best part was just spending time together. We don't get to see each other very often, so when we do it's really special. I am really blessed to have Andrea as my friend and I couldn't have asked for a better surprise... I hope that it's not another 5 months before we see each other again! Michael couldn't come this weekend - he has been working on his Master's degree at UNH this summer and he just found out that he won a grant to do some research down in Chile this summer. Congratulations, Michael! But we did get to talk to him on speaker phone and hear all about his funny vice principal and a student named AJ.

I can't really express in words how much Andrea's visit means to me. It seems like anything I write right now really doesn't sound good enough. So I'm going to end by just saying 'thank you' to Jared and Andrea for cooking up this little surprise. It really made me so happy!