Monday, April 19, 2010

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Jack is 5!!

My baby is 5!!!  Can you believe that?!  It just seems like yesterday that I first held him in my arms and yet it's been 5 whole years.  I want to stop time.  I want him to stay little and innocent and sweet.  This year in particular with school he has just changed so much.  He is still a lovely child but he has definitely learnt some new tricks and things.  I guess too being an only child he has been so influenced by us up until now and to him also it must seem like such a change to be in such different circumstances with so many different  personalities.
He was pretty excited the night before his birthday.  I didn't think he was ever going to be able to get to sleep.  He was also pretty excited when he saw his big stack of pressies on the coffee table.

After opening all his presents and having breakfast we started getting everything ready for his party. My Mum came over early and kept Jack occupied by playing with some of his new games and things.

The party was in the afternoon and although I had been very worried that there wouldn't be enough party guests due to so many of his school friends being away on holidays, we ended up having just a good amount of people and everyone fit in the new patio area so that worked out well.

After the obligatory "Pass the Parcel" we played "stick the Omnitrix on Ben 10" (an Omnitrix is the watch thing on Ben 10's arm that makes him turn into the different aliens).  I just found a picture of Ben 10 on the internet and blew it up to a gigantic size and printed out the Omnitrix stickers.


We then played a great game I found on a blog I came across.  I froze some of Jack's Ben 10 characters in a container of water and the game was that the evil character Vilgax had used a freeze gun to entrap all the Ben 10 aliens.  The aliens were put at one end of the patio and at the other end were two bowls of warm water.  The kids were each given a plastic shot cup and had to cart the water from the bowl to the other end of the patio to melt the Ben 10 characters out of the ice.  Obviously this could be done for any theme of party and I would highly recommend it!!  The kids were so occupied with it and hardly any adult interaction was required.  If you can have enough of whatever character you're using would be a definate advantage though.  We did have some heated exchanges over who's alien was who's to unfreeze.


After that we played "Musical Statues" and then had the cake.  This years cake was much much easier than last years and Jack was very impressed by it so that made me very happy.  It was a pretty tasty cake too.  I used ganache for the crumb layer and even though I didn't have time to let it set hard before applying the fondant it turned out pretty smooth.(It looked better irl)


After the cake I let the kids play for a little while before everyone hopped in the new pool.  It was great to have the pool and everyone had a blast.  Peer pressure works SOOOOOOO well for kids.  Jack has been going to swimming classes for two years and was doing ok there and the few times we'd used the pool before the party he had gained a bit of confidence but OMG you should have seen him at the party.  He swam side to side of the pool all by himself!!  I was stunned!!  Since then he has turned into a real water kid too.  Owen has been on holidays over the Easter period so they've been swimming almost every afternoon and Jack can now dive in and swim the full LENGTH of the pool, he can jump in and go down to the bottom, it's amazing.  It's like a different child. 


See look, here he is swimming underwater!! 


So that was his party!!  He had a great time and was very pleased that some of his new school friends got to come to his party, he thought that was pretty cool indeed!!  He got some fantastic gifts and he and Owen have been kept very occupied on the holidays playing games and building Lego (I built a Lego house, it was way fun!!  Lego sure has changed in 30 years).

And now for some random snaps...the beautiful lantern my brother and sister-in-law gave me a few years ago for Christmas.  It's been sitting in it's box in the cupboard waiting for somewhere to be hung.


...The double rainbow that was over our fair city the other afternoon. 


...just Jack


..and Jack making pizza dough!!



I have been having problems with my computer, hence the late birthday post but hopefully it's all systems go now.  It's been driving my bonkers.
That's all folks :)
Ciao

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