Haines Happy Birthdays!

As you know from my last post, yesterday (Thursday) was Matt's birthday. Since we don't have the boys on Thursday nights, today (Friday) was our first chance to give him his birthday gift. As you can see below, we did something a little different for his birthday this year.

Here is Matt posing with what he thinks are his birthday gifts (and of course, you can see that Harli thinks everything is always for her.)




However, before he had a chance to open any of them, we informed him that he had to pick half of the gifts and give them to his brother. Andy, who had previously been sitting and half-heartedly watching, all of a sudden became fully engaged in what was going on. We explained to them that they are both getting the same thing for their birthdays this year (Andy's birthday is next month). So in order to not ruin the surprise for Andy, he gets to share in the gift opening process. Matt, being the thinker that he is, took a nice long time to strategically decide which gifts to unload on his brother.

Andy grew quite impatient with his brother's dawdling. After much pleading from Andy, Matt finally finished allocating the boxes.

Then they got the green light to start opening the boxes. You can see from Matt's face in the picture below that he was quite confused about what he discovered after opening the first box.

What was in the box? 2 little Scrabble tiles!

That's right... every box contained 2 or 3 tiles each, for a total of 14.

So now it was on to the next phase. Trying to put the pieces together to figure out what their birthday gift was!

They begged and begged for hints, but Scot and I told them they had to work for it. They seemed to have a much better knack of spelling out inappropriate words, like "topless," than figuring out what the right answer was. But what do you expect with two teenage boys?

Finally, after about 10 minutes of deliberation, they figured it out!

Andy spelled out "Vegas" as a joke, but then Matt quickly put the rest of the words together. I'm not sure what they were more excited about- the fact that they were going to Vegas or that they finally finished indulging in my birthday torture puzzle! Here they are opening their own travel itineraries showing them the official details of their gift.

This is actually a birthday gift for all of us. Since all of our birthdays are relatively close to each other (Matt's was yesterday, mine was today, Scot's is the 27th, and Andy's is April 20th), we decided to do something different this year and do a big combined gift for all. So after the boys get out of school this summer, we will be heading out to my dad's house in Las Vegas for a week!

We purchased the tickets for the trip so long ago, and we've had to keep it a secret from the boys. It's been killing me! Even though today was MY birthday, I was most excited about getting home to give them THEIR birthday gifts and see their reactions. My mom said that means I am officially old. :) I am just really looking forward to us taking this vacation together. I know some of you may think Vegas is an odd place for a family vacation, but there is SO much to see and do in Vegas besides gambling. (Actually, Scot and I don't even gamble when we're there on our own.) Plus, as I mentioned before, I have family there, including my dad (although he's actually in Tulsa for work right now, but hopefully he can come back to LV while we're there), my step-mom, three of my brothers, and a niece and nephew. So I think this will definitely be a great birthday trip for all of us!