It was Amandio's birthday on 08-08-08! According to the Chinese (in fact most Asian cultures) this is a very lucky date, the number eight representing prosperity, luck and power. It is not by chance that the most popular mobile phone/house/street number, birth/wedding date.. is eight. It is also the symbol of infinity and of course coincides with the start of the Olympics in Beijing.
This year, it being a special date and also foreseeing that there will be a lot of attention on me once the IVF starts, I wanted to make his birthday extra special. We usually buy a joint present for both our birthdays but this year we decided to not to have any presents. Excellent, that meant for a real surprise!! Long story short, after a month of searching, involving many of our friends and attempts in vain, I eventually found a company in Singapore that shipped a Mahogany Poker Chip case (750) and a Blackjack dealer shoe. The difficulty lay in the fact that gambling is illegal in Thailand so most online companies wouldn't ship here. Anyway, I am sure that there will now be many card nights ahead with the guys. I remembered how Amandio used to love nights like that with his French friends when we lived in Ireland. He can dazzle all his new friends with his card tricks and croupier skills ;-)
The night before his birthday his friends from work organised a really lovely surprise party at a Thai restaurant. This is one of the toughest things to do, especially when you are like me and can't keep secrets! The decoy (invitation for drinks at a friend's house who just got promoted) along with Amandio's suspicions that we were planning something for him on Friday night, threw him off the trail and he was genuinely surprised that night. Thanks you guys!
The night of his birthday we were invited to the Four Seasons to an Italian restaurant by a Portuguese friend of ours. To mark the occassion we had champagne in the lobby with a quartet playing classical music behind us and toasted at 8:08pm. (forgot to take a picture of that!). Here he got his third birthday cake!! He had already received a huge chocolate one at work and of course the previous night too at the surprise dinner. Hmmm...
To compensate he went out yesterday and bought a top of the range tennis racket to start sweating off those extra kilos ;-)
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