BIRTHDAY SHENANIGANS - PART 1

Well my poor, deprived kids have never had a proper birthday party, just a nice day out somewhere followed by lots of people who love them visiting them over a couple of days around their birthday bringing pressies, cards and most importantly lots of kisses and cuddles.

Well this year before the shock, but fabulous, pregnancy I had been planning a lovely big party in my head, but unfortunately I am far from the most organised person in the world and so when the exhaustion and nausea that are the first trimester of pregnancy took over I went to ground and forgot all about couldn't face arranging a birthday party until it was all too late. 

I was however determined that they would have some sort of party given their current obsession with party food and balloons so little old me decided that we would have a very small (due to our dolls house size house) indoor teddy pears picnic themed party.  There were no fancy invitations I am afraid just an email to a few people inviting them mainly because if they had had  to wait for invitations they would never have got them. 

I then sourced some gingham table covering in red and green from Dunelm; one to use as a cover for the dining table and one for the indoor picnic rug.  I really am not very creative, but I decided that it would be nice to use the offcuts from the table coverings along with some ribbon to make some bunting and a happy birthday banner, after all we were having a picnic even if it was inside in the middle of winter.  Other than some red, white and green balloons and some gingham ribbon I didn't need to buy much else in terms of decorations as we gave all of the teddy bears that we had in the house a red gingham bow and just used them to create little bear scenes in the living room and used the bears as weights for the balloons by tying the balloons to their arms or legs.  We had a big bear reading three little bears a story, some bears having a cup of tea, one on its mobile phone, a big one on the dining table guarding the food and a few others scattered around for good measure. 

Unfortunately the reason that I am having to describe all of this as opposed to putting lots of pictures up is because all of my hard work was destroyed enjoyed by the children before I got the chance to take many photographs and then even the few photos that I did manage to take of the whole day were rubbish (I am a natural light kind of a girl when it comes to photos and I am just not very good at flash photography, I have no ability to take a really good photo as opposed to just an ok one using a flash. Anyway I digress, sorry!)

Food was typically over catered party food (I have a distinct inability to correctly cater any event, I just can't stand the thought of there not being enough).  So there was sarnies (bear shaped ones for the children), crisps (none other than Pom Bear for the kids, obviously) pizza fingers (well pitta breads with tomato puree and cheese on), vegetable sticks (which you may be surprised to find out went down very well with the kids), failed bear shaped jellies, biscuits, raisins, fruit and a million other calorie and/or fat ridden foods which on the whole I normally avoid when it comes to my kids, but I know that they generally make sensible choices when it comes to food, ie fruit and a biscuit so at parties I just roll with it and make up for it over the few following days.   At this point I must say a special thank you to the Irwins lot as you are so affectionately labelled (you know who you are) for showing up post party and finishing off the food, I was genuinely so glad not to have to throw half of it away.  You rock!

The piece de résistance of the food table (which I also have no decent photographs of despite how delicious it all looked) was this cake.  As I am not very skilled at baking cakes (although I did attempt it last year just so that I could say that I had baked A&D a birthday cake at some point in their lives, even if it was not a very good one) they normally get a good old Costco one as I would never normally go to this expense for a birthday cake, but given the theme of the party I just could not resist it and a friend of mine raves about M&S cakes so I felt the need to try and we really weren't disappointed.  It tasted lush and looked exactly as it does in the picture.

We had a few non attendees due to illness (we missed you all very much) so in the end we had five children and five adults.  I let the party run its own course really, the children were really happy just to ruin all of my decorations play when they got here so I left them to it for a little while, this was followed by our picnic then pass the parcel, the prize for which was a Winnie The Pooh book as obviously I wanted to stay in the bear theme and we just had time to blow out the candles on the birthday cake before it was time to go home.

Because the children were confined to my teeny house I had been worrying about needing to fill time so my lovely husband had made a pin the bow tie  on the bear a la pin the tail on the donkey, but I needn't have worried because we didn't even have time to play it so have stashed that away for use at a later date.  Its a good job we used the cardboard bear as a decoration and had stuck him in the window so at least he got some exposure. 

I wanted to continue with the bear theme for party bags, so I made them fairly simple and just got some teeny teddy bears from Asda and popped them into some lovely brown paper gift bags that I found in good old Wilkinsons (where the gingham ribbon came from too) along with a teeny bag of Haribo sweets.  I have since heard that the bargain bears went down very well.

As if the party with the children's friends wasn't enough; after a short interlude we were inundated with visits from nannies, aunties, cousins and a good deal of others.  This gave A&D the opportunity to sing happy birthday and  blow out the candles on their cake for a second time that day which they were absolutely thrilled about.

A&D seem to have become highly accomplished at ripping open wrapping paper since the last time they had presents and luckily for them none of their guests came empty handied so A&D were thoroughly spoiled and I spent the next few days telling them how extremely lucky they were to be loved by so many people and to get so many lovely things.

So finally just a huge thank you to everybody who remembered them on their birthday and who took the time to be here.  Love you xxx