It was coming up to Sharmini’s 16th Christian Birthday, the floors should be finished, could we manage to surprise her?
For those who know Sharmini, you know that she is an incredibly kind, loving and generous person. She is always looking for ways to bless others and one way that she has planned to do that once the house is finished is by doing High Teas for ladies.
She has often purchased tea sets or saucers at garage sales and started storing them in the shed. I knew once we had done the first one, the excitement of it would be different, so thought it would be nice for the first one to be for her…
Her 16th Anniversary of becoming a Christian was approaching, so we wondered if we could pull off a surprise, despite the fact she is notoriously difficult to surprise even for small things. We decided to give it a go anyway.
As my memory is incredibly bad, it started with scouring her massive lists of people she knows and stays in contact with. Numbers were strictly limited as we weren’t even sure we would have a toilet in the house and didn’t know how many tea cups etc we had.
We picked a date (27th May) 3 days before the actual anniversary and set to work.
As the younger children find it hard to keep secrets, only the two older boys knew for the first 5 weeks. We needed to arrange clothes and extra tea cups, so we use Mothers Day as a decoy and excuse to arrange and buy things to avoid giving away the surprise. It also served as a back up – if the surprise for any of it was discovered, we could say the surprise for Mothers Day was ruined but keep the main event hidden.
The first few weeks were consumed with planning and working on the house helping with the floors that a friend was doing. This led to the office computer having to have to be down in the caravan area making if extremely difficult to email people secretly – leading to a lot of fun (and stress) as interruptions were constant and the threat of being found out was huge.
A friend (thank you Claire!!) offered to help arrange the food and Sharmini’s sister (thank you Sunita!!) offered to do the decorations making things much easier.
For the house, the floor being finished was a must, a toilet the second priority, and running water next…
Alongside the floor, we started to work on getting the toilet ready to install, the work that went in to this was incredible.
From digging trenches and pits, to physically, by hand washing and rinsing the drainage stones to concrete – it was a mammoth task.
Rhett & Locky starting to trowel the floor after weeks of grinding and prep work:
The Pit for the absorption trench:
Washing the stones to fill the pit
The slotted pipe in place:
Hand compacting – we had lent the compactor out!
Concrete in:
Leaving our mark:
Even the ‘simple’ task of picking the toilets and piping up proved difficult – the boys had to design & weld an addition to our trailer to be able to get the pipe on board. It worked amazingly well:
The toilet chambers:
We were on track to have the toilet installed, so we started to think about the other problems:
Where would the cars go, what about tables, chairs etc?
Amazingly, we found some free tables on Gumtree and very reasonable chairs from a cafe closing down, we just needed to make some taller serving tables. Old 44 gallon drums with a wood cut out were made secretly early mornings and hidden away.
The only way we could think for the cars was to arrange a valet parking. The only place we could park cars was deep sand and most people would get their cars bogged – not to mention it was quite a walk. So we made up some laminated cards and a keyboard. Of course I had to talk to the boys about ‘new’ cars – ones that might not start unless your foot was on the brake, seatbelt on etc – things they had not come across before. As it was all ladies I never thought to mention things like hi stall converters in V8 utes…thankfully at 12 & 13 years old they were very capable of driving on the limestone & sand
We managed to get the electrics done, water hooked up to two taps, the toilet installed(!!), a laundry sink for the toilet and in the kitchen and all barrels done in time.
This left clothes, tea cups, table cloths and things like tea and milk to arrange. We had very, very limited time to do this – all rushing to the car the second Sharmini left on an errand to scour Salvo stores and Kmart with 6 children. We also had to count & sort the tea cups, then store everything in boxes easy to get to on the day. Although everything was last minute (or should I say last second!), we managed to get nearly everything – setting up a secret freezer and fridge to store needed items.
A friend had agreed to take Sharmini to lunch the day of the event, and we had many lists to get through in the 2 hours she would be away.
The ladies start to arrive and are amazing at helping set out the teat cups and food. Thank you all SOOO much!!
Sharmini only minutes away…
Myself or the children often have a surprise waiting for Sharmini when she returns, so it was not suspect for Miss S to ask her to put on a blind fold and walk her inside and say open your eyes on the count of 3. To see the shock and awe and watch Sharmini literally stable backwards & go outside again was incredible.
She was completely amazed – and speechless for nearly an hour lol
Having had a migraine in the morning, one of the ladies, a chiro, gives Sharmini a massage…(thanks Aya!!):
There was an amazing time of sharing, people saying lovely things about Sharmini and glorifying God, who has changed her so much in the 16 years since she first responded to His grace.
I forgot many things, including a time of worship that was sorely missed (kicking myself) and I wanted to prepare some photos and a testimony of how she has changed since then, but ran out of time. We are looking at planning an event where we (maybe together) share our testimonies so people can get to know us and understand us a little better – giving glory to God who has changed (and is changing us) and hopefully be part of other’s journey towards Jesus.
I also forgot to publicly acknowledge and thank people for helping and serving. A lot of it was a blur…Sharmini still in disbelief!
The love & service that so many lavished on her was amazing and very appreciated.
Thank you so much to all who came and those who helped.
Rhett and the crew for working under pressure of many other jobs to get the floor done
Claire for arranging the food despite being heavily pregnant (and giving birth a week before the event – Congrats!) The food was amazing and gave Sharmini a great selection of food she could eat.
Sunita for arranging the decorations – they looked incredible.
Julie for taking Sharmini out and bringing up items secretly.
To everyone who cooked – thank you the food was amazing!
To all the ladies who came early and helped set up the tea cups and food – we would not have been ready without you.
To Mark and Eli who served as Butlers you did an absolutely outstanding job
To our children who gave up free time early in the morning and later at night to make signs, tables, build, look after babies, run around salvos (literally) then arrange 30 activities in a row so the babies had forgotten we went to the stores and never gave it away…the list is endless.
Thank you – I saw Sharmini’s heart receive love. Amazing.
We look forward to being able to bless and serve many through events like this. Bring it on!
She has often purchased tea sets or saucers at garage sales and started storing them in the shed. I knew once we had done the first one, the excitement of it would be different, so thought it would be nice for the first one to be for her…
Her 16th Anniversary of becoming a Christian was approaching, so we wondered if we could pull off a surprise, despite the fact she is notoriously difficult to surprise even for small things. We decided to give it a go anyway.
As my memory is incredibly bad, it started with scouring her massive lists of people she knows and stays in contact with. Numbers were strictly limited as we weren’t even sure we would have a toilet in the house and didn’t know how many tea cups etc we had.
We picked a date (27th May) 3 days before the actual anniversary and set to work.
As the younger children find it hard to keep secrets, only the two older boys knew for the first 5 weeks. We needed to arrange clothes and extra tea cups, so we use Mothers Day as a decoy and excuse to arrange and buy things to avoid giving away the surprise. It also served as a back up – if the surprise for any of it was discovered, we could say the surprise for Mothers Day was ruined but keep the main event hidden.
The first few weeks were consumed with planning and working on the house helping with the floors that a friend was doing. This led to the office computer having to have to be down in the caravan area making if extremely difficult to email people secretly – leading to a lot of fun (and stress) as interruptions were constant and the threat of being found out was huge.
A friend (thank you Claire!!) offered to help arrange the food and Sharmini’s sister (thank you Sunita!!) offered to do the decorations making things much easier.
For the house, the floor being finished was a must, a toilet the second priority, and running water next…
Alongside the floor, we started to work on getting the toilet ready to install, the work that went in to this was incredible.
From digging trenches and pits, to physically, by hand washing and rinsing the drainage stones to concrete – it was a mammoth task.
Rhett & Locky starting to trowel the floor after weeks of grinding and prep work:
The Pit for the absorption trench:
Washing the stones to fill the pit
The slotted pipe in place:
Hand compacting – we had lent the compactor out!
Concrete in:
Leaving our mark:
Even the ‘simple’ task of picking the toilets and piping up proved difficult – the boys had to design & weld an addition to our trailer to be able to get the pipe on board. It worked amazingly well:
The toilet chambers:
We were on track to have the toilet installed, so we started to think about the other problems:
Where would the cars go, what about tables, chairs etc?
Amazingly, we found some free tables on Gumtree and very reasonable chairs from a cafe closing down, we just needed to make some taller serving tables. Old 44 gallon drums with a wood cut out were made secretly early mornings and hidden away.
The only way we could think for the cars was to arrange a valet parking. The only place we could park cars was deep sand and most people would get their cars bogged – not to mention it was quite a walk. So we made up some laminated cards and a keyboard. Of course I had to talk to the boys about ‘new’ cars – ones that might not start unless your foot was on the brake, seatbelt on etc – things they had not come across before. As it was all ladies I never thought to mention things like hi stall converters in V8 utes…thankfully at 12 & 13 years old they were very capable of driving on the limestone & sand
We managed to get the electrics done, water hooked up to two taps, the toilet installed(!!), a laundry sink for the toilet and in the kitchen and all barrels done in time.
This left clothes, tea cups, table cloths and things like tea and milk to arrange. We had very, very limited time to do this – all rushing to the car the second Sharmini left on an errand to scour Salvo stores and Kmart with 6 children. We also had to count & sort the tea cups, then store everything in boxes easy to get to on the day. Although everything was last minute (or should I say last second!), we managed to get nearly everything – setting up a secret freezer and fridge to store needed items.
A friend had agreed to take Sharmini to lunch the day of the event, and we had many lists to get through in the 2 hours she would be away.
The ladies start to arrive and are amazing at helping set out the teat cups and food. Thank you all SOOO much!!
Sharmini only minutes away…
Myself or the children often have a surprise waiting for Sharmini when she returns, so it was not suspect for Miss S to ask her to put on a blind fold and walk her inside and say open your eyes on the count of 3. To see the shock and awe and watch Sharmini literally stable backwards & go outside again was incredible.
She was completely amazed – and speechless for nearly an hour lol
Having had a migraine in the morning, one of the ladies, a chiro, gives Sharmini a massage…(thanks Aya!!):
There was an amazing time of sharing, people saying lovely things about Sharmini and glorifying God, who has changed her so much in the 16 years since she first responded to His grace.
I forgot many things, including a time of worship that was sorely missed (kicking myself) and I wanted to prepare some photos and a testimony of how she has changed since then, but ran out of time. We are looking at planning an event where we (maybe together) share our testimonies so people can get to know us and understand us a little better – giving glory to God who has changed (and is changing us) and hopefully be part of other’s journey towards Jesus.
I also forgot to publicly acknowledge and thank people for helping and serving. A lot of it was a blur…Sharmini still in disbelief!
The love & service that so many lavished on her was amazing and very appreciated.
Thank you so much to all who came and those who helped.
Rhett and the crew for working under pressure of many other jobs to get the floor done
Claire for arranging the food despite being heavily pregnant (and giving birth a week before the event – Congrats!) The food was amazing and gave Sharmini a great selection of food she could eat.
Sunita for arranging the decorations – they looked incredible.
Julie for taking Sharmini out and bringing up items secretly.
To everyone who cooked – thank you the food was amazing!
To all the ladies who came early and helped set up the tea cups and food – we would not have been ready without you.
To Mark and Eli who served as Butlers you did an absolutely outstanding job
To our children who gave up free time early in the morning and later at night to make signs, tables, build, look after babies, run around salvos (literally) then arrange 30 activities in a row so the babies had forgotten we went to the stores and never gave it away…the list is endless.
Thank you – I saw Sharmini’s heart receive love. Amazing.
We look forward to being able to bless and serve many through events like this. Bring it on!