Birthdays........

Our little girl and I have made the invitations to her party. If you do not have kids you will be blissfully unaware of the massive amount of pressure and junk that oh so quickly gets thrown into parties. Who to invite? How many to invite? Do I need to invite those who invited her? Where to have it? Entertainment? Type of cake? Take home goodie bags? Yep and she is six, I am not organising her flippin' wedding!! Did you know that probably just by mentioning birthdays some company will comment on this post and link me to their site offering so much stuff, some of which cute, some of which tat and all of which we can and do need to live without. I will delete 'em quick, let me tell you.

Yesterday she went to a party. I really struggled on what gift to buy. I did not want to overspend but I did not want to be buying some kind of plastic junk either. I found myself wishing that I was not thinking so much. I settled for a cute little duffle bag which, at least, is useful but I am now wondering how many children were used to make the bag who will never have a party........................... . Anyway this was a princess type party where they all got their make up done at a beauty salon. They are all five and six years old. Our wee one got her nails done as the eczema means a strict stance on make up. I was hugely relieved when I arrived to collect her and was met by a collection of little girls with sparkly glitter and little flowers, hearts around their eyes and not a group of little adults.

Our party is next on the social circuit. We made our invitations today and they are cute. The photographs do not do them justice. So with a theme of dots and stripes I really want these kids to have an absolute ball while I do not spend money we do not have and also keep eco at the front of my mind. We are going to plant sunflowers, name them and decorate their containers (dots and stripes), we are going to decorate fairy cakes with candy (dots and stripes), play all the usual games with the pass the parcel prize (dots and stripes paper, with a good deal of our brown recycled paper and newspaper!) being a ceramic frog plant pot with ceramic paints to paint it. I am so open for any ideas from anyone out there. Six little girls may just be grateful for your creativity!!

One of my blog readers just happened to have a spare nintendo ds which may just do the trick. Thanks Beth! We just need to see if we fry the thing with a voltage incompatibility. No-one appears to have a spare cannon so we have headed down the knights and castles line for the littler boy and picked up a set with a large catapult and two other firing instruments from ebay today for 99p. Kind of felt like I owed the guy some more but that is ebay for you and I was the only bidder.

And the good news is that our camera is fixed. It would have been hard to head into this season without one. We had a Cannon that we loved but Mike discovered it did not bounce well off a stone floor and the lcd screen broke so we bought another one the same. For some reason it took a real huff on me a couple of weeks back and got stuck on review mode. So we could take pictures with the dropped one and then view them on the other. Workable but a major pest. Mike decided today to see if he could swap parts from one to another. A company wanted £75 for this. Hey! We can buy a third one for not a lot more. Well who'da thunk? Add camera fixer to the Mike's CV!! Or was it the power of prayer?