Ethics and Birthdays

I have been battling with a moral dilemma for the last few days. Is it ever acceptable to lie to your wife? Is it ever acceptable to scare the living daylights out of your wife? Well, after much anguish over the ethics of the situation, I decided to go ahead with my plan and throw a surprise birthday party for Sarah last night. Birthdays bring up so many ethical questions that we would not normally even think about. I started plotting with some friends at church a few weeks ago.

This was Sarah's plan: Sarah and I decided that after she got home from work last night we would go to downtown Greenville and eat at a nice pizza place and walk around the beautiful downtown area.

Here is what really happened: Sarah came home from work early yesterday and we went shopping for frames for the oil painting that we bought in Italy (which is going to cost more than the painting itself). We visited two framing places here in town then we made a quick stop at Lowe's so Sarah could get some ideas on how to spend her gift card that her coworkers bought her. I though she should put it toward a grill, but she wanted to spend it on boring landscaping stuff.

After we had killed some time in Lowe's, it was 6:00 and everyone should have been at our house by then. At that exact moment I "happened" to have a slight asthma attack and realized that I had "forgotten" my inhaler at home. When we got home I got Sarah to come in the house and there she got a little surprise . . . and she almost passed out.

We had a great time; ate some pizza; ate some ice cream; all the good party stuff. The party lasted long into the night (10:30- I must be getting old). Sarah got some cool scrapbooking stuff, some money, a gift card to Michael, some movies (The Love Bug and The Parent Trap), a bluetooth headset for her new pink razr phone, and some candles (and a really big surprise).