A month before Stephen’s birthday, I realized that the local group who flamingoed yards for a living had gone out of business. This was sad-making because I had been planning to give him the full flamingo treatment on his 40th birthday for some time. One of our best pals, Renée, suggested we do it ourselves. I started checking around and found two-foot tall, inflatable dinosaurs at the Dollar Store. Score!

I asked for donations of $1 to sponsor a dinosaur and you all came through for me! I got enough fundage to pay for the dinosaurs, the sign and to take Stephen out for a burrito while we were at Dragon*con. Thanks!!

Stephen claims he was properly surprised even though the day before I accidentally let it slip that there was something happening for his birthday that involved dinosaurs. He thought it was a riot that I’d been sneaking around for a month and threatening to disinherit the kids if they told and then I let it slip the day before. Meh, he was still surprised. Or at least he faked it really well.

The whole set up took me about two hours. The kids and I were waiting for him to get home, standing in the dino field wearing dino hats and blowing dino noisemakers. I’m sure we were quite the site.