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2005-11-20 - 11.30pm previous entry next entry
Arthur's birthday party - photos and movie clips....
Oh my gosh, I am just so so so sooooooo behind!!! I have so much that I need to write about here, and I can NOT believe I have left it ELEVEN days since I last wrote! Yeurgh. I didn't even write about Arthur's birthday party, which feels like ages ago now :(
Thank you all so much for the birthday wishes for Arthur, and the lovely comments on the photos! Also I meant to say before, thank you all for the helpful advice or even just sympathy (!) over his constipation issues. I need to write about EVERYTHING at the moment. But no time. I will make this entry about his party, and then hopefully update again soon about other things. Maybe it will take me several entries to get it all off my chest?!
Okay, Arthur's party went great! I had not expected a BAD party at all, but somehow it was way better than I even imagined it would be! :) My grandparents and my parents were there, and my brother and his Sarah, and Neil's sister and our little niece, Ella. Neil's brother couldn't come because of work, and his parents obviously can't due to ill health and living miiiiiles away. But it was lovely!
We were so behind on getting everything ready, and my parents offered to come round in the morning and help (the party was 3.30pm). It took us till almost party time to get everything done! I'm sooooooooo grateful for my lovely parents' help. My daddy put balloons up all over the ceiling and a bunch on the front door with shiny ribbons :) They all had "Happy 1st Birthday" printed on them :) I love having balloons on the front door at a little one's birthday party. It tells the whole world that it's someone special's birthday! Anyway, we put 20 balloons up. Neil blew them all up the night before (well, I blew 3 but got exhausted!). Then we put up the multi-coloured fairy lights that Arthur loved SO much as a tiny baby! I was excited to see those up again. It made me feel nostalgic! They first went up in preparation for my homebirth. Ahhh, such special memories! :)
I decided we didn't have NEARLY enough fairy lights, hehe! So Neil bought TWO HUNDRED more coloured fairy lights when he went out to get some food and drink for the party! Wow! We had them all around the ceiling and the mirror. I LOVE fairy lights! They make me feel cosy and like a little girl again. Arthur loves them too. We still have all the decorations up and Arthur points to them constantly. He likes it when Neil gets home from work and lifts him high up so that Arthur can bop the balloons hanging from the ceiling! If the fairy lights aren't switched on, he points and makes sounds with direct looks at me, asking me to switch them on!
Anyway so it all looked pwetty and festive! I baked Arthur's birthday cake and decorated it really simply. It was a plain vanilla sponge cake with raspberry jam for the filling, mmmm! I made plain white water icing for the top and just made a big number "1" on the icing with hundreds and thousands. And put a single candle on top, of course! We completely failed to take any photos of all the important things, tsk, but I took some rather grey and grainy still images from the camcorder, so here are a few - first just the cake (weird colours though - the hundreds and thousands are really bright primary colours), then Arthur being unable to resist touching the hundreds and thousands just after we sang happy birthday and blew out his candle, and then Arthur eating some cake with Daddy:
Also, for your viewing pleasure (!!), a rather dark video of the birthday boy receiving his cake to the tune of "Happy Birthday to you!" :) I wish you could see his face more clearly. He was so excited. I blew his candle out and then he did this cute shy smiley thing at everyone. It's harder to see on the video than I thought, sadly. But here it is!
Arthur opened his presents from nearly everyone, except there were so many that I think he would have been overwhelmed with all of them at once - he was so eager and excited about each one! He tore the paper off the presents himself (with my help) and immediately started playing with each new thing. It was hard to get him interested in the next present to open, so we decided to leave 3 of them till the next day - the ones from my parents and grandparents, who didn't mind a bit. He got a Mega Blocks Monsters building set and a GREAT book with jigsaw pieces in it from SIL, and simple jigsaws and a Meg and Mog hardback book from my brother and Sarah (I LOVE Meg and Mog!!!). He was so keen on the jigsaws, but he likes to take the pieces out (they all have a peg on each piece to make it easy to lift them out) and then pile them up or stash them somewhere! He loves stacking and stashing at the moment. He can stack 3 cups on top of each other, and stack the whole set inside each other one by one. We are constantly losing things at the moment because Arthur has 4 or 5 hidey holes around the living room where he likes to stash things! He likes to find a hole to drop things down into. He goes around choosing things to put in it, and makes several trips, hehe! It's so funny! I usually find several clean nappies, half the jigsaw pieces, plastic fruit, toy cars, and unopened mail down there. He has also started taking a chosen item all the way into the kitchen and depositing it carefully in the washing machine or tumble dryer! Funny boy :)
Anyway, so he loves his presents! He tries to put the jigsaw pieces back on the board they came from, but just plops them down on the board so far. He is also trying to put the shapes through the holes on his shape sorter, though without any success so far. He loves that thing.
Anyway, PARTY! I have to hurry up - Neil has gone to bed, and so should I. He has to go to work early in the morning so I will need to be up early too to watch Arthur when I would normally get extra sleep while Neil watches him. I am NOT a morning person, and I am also a pregnant person who is still getting up several times a night to nurse the little one. So I neeeeed my sleep! I'll get on with it!
The party was so relaxed. We laid out some snacky food that Arthur could eat - pretty healthy food for a party! We had fresh fruit salad, cucumber and carrot sticks, and apple rice cakes!! We did have bowls of crisps for the adults, but they were high out of reach of our little monkey! Arthur's tea consisted of the party food. He ate EIGHT rice cakes!!! He stood by the food table (low table just perfect for his height) for 40 minutes, grazing at stuff! He would pick up a rice cake, take a bite, munch it for a while, then put the rest of the rice cake carefully down in amongst the cucumbers. Then he would pick up another rice cake, take a bite, and - you guessed it! - put the rest down in the cucumbers! He did this with 8 rice cakes, and then started working his way through the discarded ones in the cucumbers! He loves apple rice cakes. He did eat some fruit salad and quite a bit of cucumber too. We forgot to peel the cucumbers but he didn't bat and eyelid. He just chewed and chewed on the tough skins like chewing gum, merrily getting on with socialising (!), and then spitting them out finally after like 10 minutes, when he had had enough of chewing them. He spits things out neatly, it's weird. He is careful as he does it and then won't budge till he has our attention to show us where the piece is, so we can dispose of it. Only then will he move on. He is such a tidy little boy! So unlike his parents, haha! My mum says he must know what he's been born into, and knows the task he faces!!! ;)
He loved the birthday cake! We didn't give him any icing or jam, but the cake was sweeeet and he LOVED it! :) He used the flats of his palms to shovel it into his mouth and eat as much as he could in one go! He never eats like that really, so I know he must have really enjoyed it :) I like that it was a nice birthday treat for him.
Everyone loved Ella - she is such a sweet little girl! She was almost 5 months old at the time of the party, and quite smiley at everyone! She is mostly on formula now, and Neil fed her a bottle which was nice. He has never fed Arthur anything other than solids, as Arthur has never once had a bottle. Oh but he did help with syringe feeding him when he wouldn't take the breast at first. Ugh. That was a hard time.
Anyway Neil is very besotted with his niece! There was a cute moment near the end of the party where Neil took both Arthur and Ella on his lap. The babies just looked at each other and were very "respectful" towards each other! Of course everybody leapt up with cameras flashing ;) I got a few photos, and took a little video clip too, so here they are. Neil said he could get used to having two, and his sister said he would have to, haha! Actually I think that is on the clip. Arthur was so curious and lovely with Ella. He kept wanting to reach out and touch her, and see her face if she wasn't looking at him. He was sooooo gentle with her. Everybody said what a wonderful big brother he is going to make :) Anyway, here they are:
Arthur was not remotely tired of company by the time everyone left a couple of hours later. He was so perfect all afternoon, smiley and waving and clapping and cheerful. I breastfed him when he asked for milk, but I did it in the kitchen because there was no WAY he would ever manage to relax and nurse for any length of time in the living room with all the guests! He was so sociable. He kept cruising round everyone's knees, stopping at each person to smile and be charming, as though he was doing a receiving line, hehe! He seemed to have a great time.
The next day my parents were going back to France, but Mummy came round in the morning to see us and play with Arthur some more, before she went home. We opened Arthur's presents from them - this fab garage and cars! He LOVES it. It makes lots of different noises and has a lift that goes up and down, and he loves to shove stuff into the lift shaft (like plastic broccoli!). He has learnt to push the buttons for the sounds, and he makes such cute smiley faces when he hears them :)
I was so sad to see my parents go home again :( I always get that way though, no matter how long they stay. I just love them and miss them so much. I took a lovely photo of my gorgeous boy with my lovely daddy. They got on so well, and I love the fact that it has been so obvious on this visit that Arthur has inherited my daddy's hair. Did I mention that recently? Arthur has curly hair! I am kind of excited about it! Not the cute curl-ups that lots of babies have at the sides (though he has those too, sometimes), but the proper curly hair on top that won't lie flat and rolls back on itself like has been wearing curlers! It's the exact same type of curling as my daddy's hair, and his mother's hair too. Every other grandparent has straight hair, so I LOVE that this is a special and unique thing that Arthur has inherited from Daddy. I made a lame-o job of using the gene - my hair curled as a toddler but then was pretty straight, and from my teens it has had a natural wave to it. It's sooooooooo long at the moment - I have no idea HOW, as I had so much cut off it when Arthur was born! But it's a foot long at least. I need it cutting again. It's less wavy the longer it gets. Anyway, I am so pleased that Arthur is actually DOING curls with his gene, hehe! I am curious to see how curly he stays as the years pass. Daddy and granny had ringlets! Daddy had long hair in the 70s and it was all ringletty :) So, real curls! I hope Arthur has real curls too. I think it's kind of special. Here are the sweet "woolly" pair:
And last but not least, a photo of Arthur taken during his "wind down for bed after the party" (heh, yeah right!) time. He was still so wired, and didn't go to sleep for ages after he went to bed that night. I think he was up till 9!!!! Sooooooo late for Arthur! Anyway, he did a lot of walking at the party, just a few steps between people or to me mostly. There wasn't much room with all the people in our little living room! After the party he was walking towards me so I took a photo - the first one I have of him walking!
He wore jeans and a little shirt and waistcoat from Next at his party :) It had embroidered animals on it. He got lots of compliments :)
Oh I almost forgot, I have two more video clips to post - a teeny tiny one of Arthur on the morning of his party just after he got up, crawling cheerfully through a sea of balloons, hehe:
And the one I mentioned before, taken on his actual birthday, of Arthur with his Ball Blast toy that Neil and I got him, dancing to the music. That's my mummy who he is looking at, encouraging him to keep dancing. She was bopping about too, but stopped every time she thought the camera might be on her, hehe!
Okay, that has to be all for now. It's getting so late and I just nursed Arthur so it's even later than I planned to finish this. I will TRY to write more soon, maybe tomorrow, to catch up on everything that is happening here. Thank you so much Meg and Jeannie for missing me and asking if everything was okay! *hugs* I feel loved :)
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