Surprise!!!

So a little before Christmas a girl at my office (Kate) told me she had bought me a baby gift and wanted to go to lunch sometime so that she could give it to me. This thrilled me... not because of the gift, but because she had asked me to lunch. I'm a little shy, so sometimes it's hard for me to make friends. So we settled on Jan. 7th - she said that after the holidays worked best for her and that she was pretty busy with a project at work for a while.

Meantime, I was busy agonizing over who from the office to invite to my baby shower. I wanted to invite Kate, since she had already told me that she had bought me a gift, and another lady who also told me the same. But if I invited them, I felt I should invite some others that I know pretty well, but I'm pretty new there and there are a lot of people I'm acquainted with, but don't know very well. I didn't want to not invite them and risk offending someone, but at the same time, it wasn't a regular party - a shower is designed for the person to receive gifts, that's the whole point. So it felt kind of weird to invite people I barely knew to give me a gift. I ended up inviting some and not inviting some others who I knew less or felt less comfortable with.

After the holidays, it was really hard to get back into the groove of working every day - we had two short weeks and two long weekends in a row and it was so nice. Thursday finally came around though, and Kate and I left for lunch a few minutes before noon. Kate asked me what I thought of Mimi's Cafe and I told her I'd never been there. She hadn't either but had heard it was pretty good, so we decided to try it. We got to the restaurant and saw the HR lady from work getting out of her car and going in. "Oh, there's Claudia!" I said and waived. Kate responded, "hm, that's weird, maybe she's interviewing someone here today..." Huh? Aren't interviews usually done at the office? But I didn't say anything because I didn't want to be argumentative and I sure had no real idea how Claudia does her interviews...

So we get out and walk in and Kate walks up to the hostess stand and says she has a reservation for Megan. "You made a reservation???" I asked, incredulously. "Yeah, I just wanted to make sure we got a table so we could get back in time..." Hmm... this girl really plans ahead, I thought.

Until we walked into the back room and I saw a big table full of faces I recognized from work! It was a baby shower! I couldn't have been more surprised. The ladies at work were so sweet and so generous! Even some of the girls that I didn't know (and didn't invite to my shower... yikes!) brought gifts. I was a little uncomfortable and a lot worried about this because they were being so nice as to buy gifts, but I didn't invite them to my shower. I worried about this during the whole lunch-shower, but later I stopped worrying because I guess it's different for them to decide to buy me something for a work shower than for me to invite them to a personal shower, thereby pretty much asking them to buy me a gift.