Ela turns 5

This must have been the most anticipated party ever. All year Ela has been asking when it was her turn for a birthday. She waited (not so) patiently throughout her cousins and her brother's celebrations until it was her own big day. The day itself was a Monday and Nannie made cupcakes which we took for all the kids at Gumnut.We opened her presents (at the crack of dawn) from family and she enjoyed riding her new bike up and down the hallway!

Then on Friday I had promised to make a cake for her to take to her pre-school, and thanks to my mum for the mould, i had a go at this fairy princess castle. It looks much more grand than it really was and of course it didn't travel well so byt he time we got it to the school there was a bit of scraping up to be done :)

The invitations had gone out long before - barbie mermaid ones (!) and luckily not all had come back as yes's as there were 28 invited. The final numbers were 25 kids in total on the day which was actually not nearly as bad as it sounds. I put that down to good planning and roping in some trusty friends.

We had plenty of games, a very large fairy castle jumping castle, a home-made pinata, a tattoo hunt, cakes,  and lots of fun. It was a very tired but happy girl who went to bed aged 5 today. But there was still enough energy to ask about her 6th birthday party....

smell the roses

All the hard work we put inot the front garden back in Auguest is finally paying off. We purched bare-root roses from Treloar earlier in the year and when they finally arrived, there was some confusion. I had a call from the courier to say he was at the front door and what should he do with the package. I had ordered 15 standards 'trees' which were about a metre in height, so I was wondering where I could get him to leave all these. He suggested he leave them at the front door - how can he possibly do that I thought....he tried to explain that he only had a small carton...so I started thinking ahh maybe Mark has bought me roses and this is a bouquet.....anyway when I got home later that day I was very surprised to see how small these roses came.

We planted them with lots of help and advice from Marg and Pete and have been watching them slowly turn from bare sticks to green leafy 'trees' and now to flowering standards. We also have some ground cover roses and a climbing rose for the ugly silver electricity pole in the corner.





update: Dec09
The roses were fed a little fertilser a few weeks back and we have seen nothing but blooms. The ones in front of the wall are growing b=much better than those under the right window for some reason. But all in all looking fab.