Wedding Shower

This will be some tonal whiplash compared with my last post. I was going to take a break from blogging until the wedding, but my coworkers did something very sweet that I feel I have to share

They threw us a wedding shower!

I took a few more photos but I'm not going to show anything with identifiable information.

I kind of knew something was coming. Sometime earlier one of the members apologized for not being about to make it to the party. I asked if she was talking about a party connected to me. She said yes and I didn't press further.

I really tried to be oblivious. Later, someone apologized, saying they didn't want to ruin the secret. So I told them not to. I saw someone wiping something off the white board when I walked in. I asked what she was erasing, and she said she couldn't tell me.

I told Lee-Anne that I felt like I was getting something a little bit more than my congratulatory flowers and Indigo gift certificate, which I'd gotten a couple weeks earlier. I didn't know what time it was going to happen, or to what scale though.

Day of, one of the members asked "When's Gryphon's party?" and I saw the staff try to quiet her, but she still said "Is it at 12:30?" So I texted Lee-Anne "I think I'm having a party at 12:30"

Apparently I still missed a bunch of tells. Apparently the calendar just had "Community Event", and I didn't think to question it. There was a Strategic Plan at the main office and it was decided that each team should send a facilitator, and both my partner facilitators called not it, leaving me to fill the role. That put me out of the office for a couple hours before the event, giving them a chance to decorate.

So I went in, they all shouted surprise. I looked around, texted Lee-Anne "Do you know anything about this? It doesn't look like it's just for me". She said she didn't know anything. I sent her pictures, and she said "Fine, I know. Coming over right now". Apparently they told her when I said that she had gotten a job, so she was able to book time off to celebrate.

They had us play The Newlywed Game. It's where you sit back-to-back with your partner, questions get asked, and you raise an indicator (they had us use our shoes) showing which person you thought the question applied to more. Because you're facing away from each other, the couple doesn't get to see each other's answers but the crowd does. It makes it funny to see how well they know other and where they disagree.

Me and Lee-Anne agreed on almost everything. People were surprised when we both said she was the better cook (they know I have a food blog). We both said our own families were the weirdest, though.

They had a bunch of gifts for us and they were super thoughtful. They gave us some wooden bowls that were sourced from a local artist and an old friend of mine. I'd bought some for my mother and brother, and when I saw that the bowl I had for myself fit perfectly into the set I gave it away too. I'd said that I needed to go to the Art Walk this year to buy two soup bowls and a salad bowl. My coworkers tracked this guy down, bought two soup bowls and he's currently making us a salad bowl.

One of my coworkers made homemade blueberry jam as kind of an homage to my grandma.

We got a camping set. We got some chocolate canoes and some drinks referencing a boat tipping over, because of mine and Lee-Anne's fourth date in which we capsized a canoe. We got a gift card to Vincenzo's, an independent local Italian grocery.

The decorations were really thoughtful too. A lot of them were drawn by hand, and a lot of the sunflowers in the bouquets came from one of my coworkers personal garden.

You might have noticed that the theme was sunflowers. Well, when we came home, we saw this:

Our first sunflower blossom of the year! It opened up while we were celebrating (and it filled out more the next day)