Mark's 30th birthday is coming up this weekend, its on Father's Day actually, and unfortunately we have a super busy weekend with Reaghan's dance recital and rehearsal, waiting for Erin's baby (her due date is tomorrow!) and celebrating Fathers Day! Since it didn't seem doable to do a big party for him on his actual birthday I decided to do something fun to surprise him this past weekend.

I've been asking him for months if there was anything special he wanted to do for his milestone birthday and we tossed around a few ideas but couldn't settle on anything. He said he didn't want a big party. {Mark is is definitely more introverted and doesn't enjoy being the center of attention.} I was struggling because I wanted to do something special so I spent so many nights brain storming for ideas and that's when I came across a brilliant idea from The Dating Diva's website!

A DIY Amazing Race!

Mark and I Loooooooove the Amazing Race. If we could pick any reality show to be on that would be it. We amuse ourselves watching the show and laughing about which one of us would be better at the challenges or if there are any that we know we'd totally fail at. Anyways, when I saw the idea for a DIY Amazing Race date night I knew it would be perfect to adapt to a party AND I knew I wanted it to be a surprise.

I recruited family to help me plan the day and started scouring Pinterest and googling ideas for how to set up the challenges. If you've never seen the Amazing Race its like a global scavenger hunt where you have to find things and complete tasks so I had to come up with things that we could complete around town.


We decided to start the race off in a park {it was the perfect cover to surprise Mark. We were having lunch at his parents who live near a park and his sister "innocently" decided it would be fun to take the girls to play at the park!} Friends and family were waiting there when we arrived with balloons and signs! Mark was totally caught off guard - which is the accomplishment of the century because he is SO hard to surprise.


My parents had arrived early and hidden everyone's first clues on the trail at the park and graciously agreed to play the 'host' so I could do the race with Mark. They also watched the girls for us and brought them back to our house which was the finish line.








We completed 8 tasks around town:
1.) Finding clues hidden in the park
2.) Drinking an X Large slurpee together before leaving 7-11
3.) Fishing letters out of a swimming pool to spell out "happy birthday" and text it to Mark
4.) Getting 15 tickets from playing any game at an Arcade
5.) Finding a marked vehicle parked in a busy parking lot {my parents parked it there for us!}
6.) Finding 3 different items in a book store and answering questions about the items
7.) Stopping at my sister's house and completing a Corn Hole or Kan Jam challenge
8.) Arriving at the finish line and completing a puzzle before racing to the "Pitt-stop" mat!

 

 


Mark and I were 2nd to last for the 1st half of the race until we made up some ground and got to the last task in 3rd place! The first 2 teams were still working on their puzzles so we were excited to think we still had a chance to win. Unfortunately we are NOT good at puzzles and we ended up coming in 4th! haha