Surprise!

Today I set up an appointment with one of my classes to review for their exam tomorrow. They are my favorite class - only 11 students and they are all really cool and fun and involved in the things we talk about so each time I am excited to go to that class and smiling all day afterwords - I love them. Well today, I come into class and it's all decorated and there's a cake on the table and they all yell "surprise, happy birthday" with beautiful beaming faces. Now, I've never had a surprise birthday party before, and I was definitely surprised for this one, not least because my birthday is more than 4 months away.
One of my students, Tim, has a very fun sense of humor. We learned in his first speech that he has taken the movie Wedding Crashers as inspiration and has crashed more than 20 weddings, along with other parties. In his 3rd speech we learned that he and some friends made up a fake MySpace girl and got a guy they knew to correspond with her and even arrange a date with her before finally admitting she was fictional. So, today we learned that every semester he gets one of his classes to believe it's the teacher's birthday and arranges a party. It was very sweet. They had an ice cream cake and other snacks and were in the middle of signing a birthday card for me when I came in. I was very surprised and smiled and thanked them and then said, "but it's not my birthday." There was a guy at the back of the room not from our class taking pictures to document the event. My students kind of stared at me and then stared at Tim and then stared back at me while he had a big goofy grin on his face. He had emailed the class earlier saying he had just learned that it was my birthday and wanted to have a party. Some of them said they had wondered if it was serious, but not enough to question him.
So my first surprise party turned out to be a surprise for all but one of the people involved. Well done, Tim!