Let me just begin by saying that I am not the best surprise keeper. Once I know about a surprise - it is agony keeping it inside so no one else knows. I have tried just saying it out loud when I am by myself to try to get it out of my system, but that hasn't seemed to work. So when my mom and I decided to surprise Brian with a birthday dinner at one of his favorite restaurants in Pittsburgh (Lidia's), it took everything in my power to try not to tell him.
We decided on Monday that we would invite some of our family/friends in Pittsburgh to Lidia's to celebrate his special day. I came home on Monday and without telling Brian, I tried to get him excited by telling him we had a surprise for him. Like I mentioned - I am a horrible surprise keeper so this is my way of telling him by not telling him. It got him pretty excited and little did I know that I would be hit with the question, "If I guess it, will you tell me?" Now I was even more excited - now the surprise became a game for me. But I tried to keep my cool and I held off until Tuesday. By Tuesday, I had rationalized that if he guesses it, the responsibility will then fall on him and I would be off the hook from keeping the surprise from him. So I gave him 10 questions - thinking there was no way he would guess it. We had only been to Lidia's once before and there could be so many things it could have been. What I forgot was to turn off our ability to read each other's minds before we started, because the first question out of the gate was, "Are we going to Lidias?"
So Brian knew where we were going and it wasn't a surprise, but he did get to be excited from Tuesday until he tasted his first bite of pasta on Friday. We had a great time with everyone and loved the pasta. If you ever go to Lidia's you have to get their pasta tasting - nothing else on the menu comes close.
