27th January 2011 (Thursday)

Party preparations warming up. Date set (Feb 12^th), venue booked (the community Arts Centre, in a room ominously entitled The Black Box), and invites printed, ready for the first day of school. In the meantime I'll be emailing all the parents because it'll still be short notice. I must say they're the most gorgeous party invites.

It's a whole different kettle of fish from previous events as we'll be having all 40 first years... the time-honoured 'pass the parcel' must finally bite the dust. On the bright side, 'musical statues' will no doubt still be appropriate and popular. Amazing how they always love doing that one, always seemed such a stupid game to me. Still, if it works, use it.

For once, yesterday we didn't go to the beach. In fact all we did all day was various little chores. Ended up going to Cartridge World TWICE, first to get the black in refilled and rapidly afterwards for the yellow and cyan, as they ran out about 12 pages into printing. There was a empty fridge to fill, and trips to the gym to get Lara signed up for next term (paperwork at start of year). First lesson's on the 4^th.

Oh, another thing we stocked up on yesterday was the birthday Pinata and absolutely OBSCENE quantities of sweets. You should've seen her face. That pinata is now stuffed with probably about two kilos of wrapped sweetites and is waiting downstairs in the garage, together with the paper plates and cups. We've got some super masks and hats as winners' prizes for all the games we'll be playing. I think for goodie bags we might ditch the usual bag-o-junk and instead bake some giant cookies, I'm sure the parents will be pleased not to have the houses filled up with more tat and kids always love a cookie if it's big enough. They wrapped up really prettily in some coloured cellophane for the Halloween party. I need not mention at this point that Lara is by now constantly vocalising the wish that her birthday might come soon.

I'd best get going on today's events now. The poor Mr seems to have been up most of the night feeling a bit unwell, so I doubt he'll be in to work. I might try and get The Girl out somewhere to be out of his way. She's currently talking to herself about the Mario Carts game she's playing on the DS, but I guess it's going to have to be Work Time soon so I'll just have to get the right hand out and shove it up Grandfather Moose. Gets really sweaty in there but she refuses to do any work without him these days. Who would have thought a hairy puppet would be so motivational.