The Much Anticipated Fairy Birthday Party

Pull up a chair and a hot drink... it's going to be a long post... with lots of photos... :)

It's been 3 weeks in the planning and yesterday it all came together and was (in the words of our 4 year old girl) "the best birthday party ever"...

Let's start at the beginning... every party needs decorations... Elizabeth had been persistently asking over the last month whether we could have decorations at her party, so I made up this bunting using bias binding tape ($3 for 5 metres) and paper triangles cut out of some scrapbooking paper I got for free ages that was just gathering dust... Basically I cute 5 triangles per 12x12" piece of paper and then sewed them into the bias binding... I got the idea from here - it was a really cheap way to create some really pretty decorations (quote from Elizabeth - "It's better than streamers Mum!")... we also had the ever compulsory balloons...

We had 9 little girls come around to celebrate the day (we were expecting 10, but we had one sick friend who couldn't make it :(...) They were all dressed up in an array of different dress ups ranging from fairies, ballerinas and princesses... As each girl arrived, we put some glittery body cream on their arms or hands to make them all pretty :)(I made up the glitter cream using some $3.00 aloe vera gel and some sparkly silvery glitter) Funnily enough, the first 5 girls arrived and they all just stood there quiet and shy and looking at each other like stunned mullet (even though they all knew each other!)... I was worried this was going to be a flop of a party since they weren't interacting at all... but my worries were unfounded, 'cos they were all playing together in no time...

We started the party off making some necklaces with flowers and beads...




This worked well to entertain the girls as everybody was arriving... and when they finished making the necklaces, they wore them (or gave them to mum and dad to hold!) and happily went off and played in the backyard either running up and down the hill, playing on the slide and toy car or just running after each other...









Once everyone had arrived and had made a necklace, we got everybody gathered around for a game of pass the parcel... oh and if you're wondering why I'm sitting in the circle it's because Elizabeth and her friend Angie insisted I be a part of it... (these photos taken by Vicky... thanks Vics... good job.. :)) -









In between each layer of the parcel there was a miniature My Little Pony figurine... the girls really liked them... (those that already had claimed their little prize were so distracted they forgot to pass the parcel around and needed prompting... LOL) They really liked them so much that nobody seemed to care about getting the main prize (a Fairies colouring in book with textas)... Elizabeth was stoked with her Pinkie Pie pony... :)

Next up was the pinata (or the "curvana"... as Elizabeth calls it... what the?!)... Apparently this was Elizabeth's favourite part of the party (I wasn't going to do a pinata, but I was so glad I did now that she told me it was her favourite part!)... The girls loved getting the random goodies out of it...













Elizabeth scored a (annoying!) recorder/whistle thing, some bangles and a few chocolates... There were heaps of lollies and chocolates, but she was content with just a couple of chocolates... she just loved her whistle!





And then there were fairy wand biscuits -





We did a "decorate-a-fairy-wand-biscuit"... there was lots of icing... and an array of coloured sprinkles and other pretty things and the chef-lings got very creative ...



















Munching on the biscuits was followed by more party food -







We had an array of fairy bread, vegetable and bacon quiche (which despite being prettied up in tinkerbell cupcake cases was not a hit... LOL), spring rolls and heart sandwiches.

Everyone was full... so full they said they didn't want to eat the birthday cake... although most changed their mind when they saw it -





This cake was the source of some serious frustration and panic for me... It took me 3 attempts to actually bake the cake during the week using the same recipe I used for Catherine's baptism cake (I burnt the first batch, the second batch I didn't make enough cake mix and rose unevenly in the bowls, so it wasn't the right mushroom shape and finally third time lucky, it all worked out)... Then assembling the damn thing, I had issues with the mushroom cap sliding off the bottom layer (due to the warm weather, my buttercream was not holding together all to well and was a bit too soft)... I was lucky that we managed to narrowly avert disaster when Phan caught the top layer when it was sliding off... (warm weather made the buttercream quite slippery and the base was a little bit too narrow to make a steady base.. in hindsight, I should have levelled off the top of the base to make it bigger, but by the time I'd realised this, I'd already covered the base in buttercream and put on the windows, doors and flowers, so it was too difficult to cut the top off)... So in the end we resorted to drilling 3 holes through a cardboard cake base and put skewers through it to keep it all together... The buttercream isn't as smooth as I would have liked it to have been on the mushroom cap, but I was so stressed out by it in the end, I just wanted to touch it as little as possible and have it just stay together! I actually ended up mortaring the cakeboard to the base with some extra buttercream with my finger (think selleys no-gaps style!) in a bid for extra stability. It all worked out in the end, but I can tell you I was in a bit of a tizz on Saturday night when it wasn't working! Elizabeth adored the cake (it was her second favourite part of the party... :))... She has been talking about it almost daily for the last 3 weeks... so seeing how much she loved it made my stress worthwhile...













Post-cake there was more squealing and shrieking while racing down the hill and running away from monsters and other imaginary games... Seriously, I think I could have got away with not planning any party activities... That hill in our backyard was instant entertainment... they could have run up and down it all day...



















What the photos do not adequately describe is the amount of high pitched squealing that was going on... seriously insane... Imagine that it was loud ... and that it was constant. Elizabeth is normally a reasonably sedate child, but put her in with a group of little girls and she becomes this crazy, excitable, shrieking banshee! And we had a flock of them! I wished I'd taped some video on my iphone to share... (Phan did get some on high-def video though... if he gets a chance to compress it down, I'll share it).

I'll mention now that Catherine was really well behaved during the party... she got freaked out at first by the large number of people.. but on the whole she was happy being in the company of either Daddy or Vicky... here's a shot of her hanging out with her godmother (and watching all the girls and probably wondering what the heck all the noise was about...)-





The party ended with Elizabeth opening the presents from her friends -













She loved them all... I think the funniest moment during the present opening was when she opened a package with a Barbie doll, but only ripped half of the wrapping paper so all she could see were legs and she goes "There are legs... I've got legs!!!"... LOL... yes... that was really exciting for her and hilarious for the rest of us ... She was happy when she saw it was an entire Barbie doll though!

Then everybody got a party bag which looked like this (I forgot to take a photo of all the party bags together, they each had a different coloured flower on the paper bag) -





And that was the end of the party... Two hours just flew by... Elizabeth was a bit sad to see all her friends go home... I think she wanted the party to go all day... "All my friends have gone home now... " she said with a melancholy face when she was the only one left... but opening up some of her toys cheered her up again...
(She really loves the barbie car and her 2 barbie dolls, polly pocket & littlest pet shop and a sparkly dancing ribbon.)

And there ends the mammoth post - hope you enjoyed it... The really weird thing is that last year when we had Elizabeth's cupcake party, I really didn't manage to take as many photos as I wanted, but for some reason this year we managed to get a lot more photos, even though I now had Catherine to attend to and we missed having Bao as an spare pair of hands... (although we did have Vicky there to help us out in between looking after her kidlets and she was more than obliging when it came to cuddling Catherine for us... :))

It took a fair bit of planning and organising, but in the end it was worth it just to see how much fun Elizabeth had with her friends...

Lots of Random Photos...

Okay... I have a tonne of photos that I've been wanting to share and seriously, if I don't do it now I'm never going to do it... So I've forgone any fancy post-processing just so I can post these photos up...

These are all pretty much random and not in any particular order -

1. We started Catherine on solids last Sunday... whilst she's not against the concept of solids, she isn't entirely convinced about it either... a bit of a contrast to Elizabeth who was gung-ho from the very first mouthful and just couldn't get enough... Still, we're making progress... so far she's had plain farex and some pear with farex (which she like a lot more than the plain farex)... but she does seem to think the bowl is better eating than the actual food...

2. We've also discovered she loves drinking cold water from a glass... I was drinking some water the other day and she was reaching out to my glass, so held the glass to her lips and she just went for it... it was hilariously cute... and she got pretty annoyed and whingy when I took the glass away! Unfortunately no pics of this since I was holding her and the glass at the time, but instead I'll share this shot of Catherine munching on a rusk one evening while we were sitting outside having dinner...





3. I still find it fascinating that there is so much rainfall here in the warmer months in Brisbane... here's the girl having some fun one day a few weeks ago when it was just bucketing down with rain ... I laugh at her choice of clothes (all her idea)... she looks like such a bag lady -





4. Elizabeth went through a phase about a month ago of watching this 2 minute short cartoon called "Trotjo" which is about a little donkey that does funny things and gets up to mischief often... she was obsessed with an episode where he went through his mummy's makeup and put white powder on his face and lipstick and turned himself into a clown... so one morning, I turned around to find Elizabeth with white toothpaste all over her face! When I asked her what she was doing she said she was trying to be a clown... too right... she is a clown!





5. I just think the frown on Catherine's face in this shot is funny...





6. And I'll finish with a bunch of photos that I took while Ong Ba where here for Catherine's christening -

And Finally There Were Birthday Cupcakes!

And after all the fun of the day, we came home and chilled out and finished the day with cupcakes! Elizabeth had helped me make them in the morning using the recipe from the famous Magnolia Bakery (recipe can be found here - it's a great recipe for a light not-too dense chocolate cake) and I just topped them with some whipped chocolate ganache (the same kind I used to fill Catherine's christening cake)... (for all you budding Masterchefs out there... I discovered piping ganache with warm/hot hands is not a great idea!!!)

And a close up of what the cakes really looked like (excuse the dodgy piping of the icing) -





I made the cute little cupcake toppers myself using various elements which can be found in the kits created by Donna Duncombe Designs ... I just printed them out onto thick paper and cut them out and then glued to toothpicks... I'm really happy with how they turned out... cute and cheerful!

And that is finally the end of the mammoth birthday posts! I hope you've enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed partaking in it!

The Four Year Old Birthday Lunch

So we asked Elizabeth a couple of day s prior to her birthday where she would like to go for lunch... we thought she might have asked to go to our regular weekend haunt Trang's Restaurant to have com suon or pho... but no... Our Little Miss Four asked to go "to the place with the calamari and the pelicans"... yes... that's right, she wanted to go back to Brett's Wharf... expensive taste! Not that I minded in the least, but we can't keep making this too much of a regular an occurence!





We mentioned to the wait staff that it was Elizabeth's birthday when we arrived and they went out of their way to make it special for her.. they brought out a mini little fruit platter made up of strawberries, orange and apple in the shape of a smiley face at the beginning and her food came our first (and again, the calamari was so tender). Phan ordered the "mushroom crusted darling downs beef, potato whip, roasted laidley tomato, shiraz jus" and I went all out and ordered "moreton bay bugs, tiger prawns, calamari, crispy potato, chive and caper beurre blanc"... again... both dishes were amazingly good ... I was totally in love with my moreton bay bugs and the calamari was so tender and the tiger prawns were lightly grilled... yum, yum, yum!

For dessert, I ordered the vanilla creme brulee, stone fruit salad and it came with a coconut tuile. Phan ordered an awesome bowen mango and valrhona chocolate trifle (that's the huge glass on the side you see in the photo above)... it had mango jelly, a chocolate biscuit crumble (which I guess could be referred to as "chocolate soil" to use a masterchef-ism :)), pieces of mango, cream and topped with a chocolate sauce... it was good... and huge! Elizabeth finished her meal off with her awesome vanilla bean flecked ice with chocolate topping ... and got a special message from the kitchen too...





It was another wonderful meal and Elizabeth enjoyed herself immensely... :)

Happy 4th Birthday To My Big Girl Elizabeth!

Well, this year Elizabeth really got into the full spirit of her birthday... she was so excited about... excited about the presents... excited about the cake... just *excited* in general!

This morning she woke up at 6am... She pottered into Catherine's room where I normally snooze on a mattress on the floor in the mornings after giving Catherine her early morning feed... On an ordinary day, she's really good and she snuggles up with me under the blanket and she really quiet and whispers when she talks to me so as to not wake Catherine...
But this morning, she came in and I whispered "Happy Birthday" to her and she couldn't contain her excitement and started telling me at a normal talking voice... "Mum... I saw some presents and there's something that's really big!"... IT was so cute... so I shoo-ed her out of Catherine's room and we went to wake up Phan so she could open her presents...

I had hidden the dollshouse under a big sheet because it was way too difficult to contemplate wrapping in paper (We had assembled it the night before, and it only took 1/2 an hour!)... so she pulled off the sheet to reveal the house and then she unwrapped all the boxes which contained furniture for the house.... (the dollhouse was from me and Phan and everybody in the family chipped in to get all the furniture to go in the dollhouse... thanks everybody!)





The dollshouse was a huge hit... she absolutely adored it! She spent all morning playing with it and when I asked her if she wanted to have breakfast at around 7:30am she said "No thanks... I want to play lots and lots and lots!"... LOL... Oh, should also make mention that I got some "ethnic" looking dolls to go with her dollhouse... and they actually are a reasonably good representation of our family (just really tanned!).. there's Mummy, Daddy, Elizabeth and a baby Catherine... and 2 elderly looking members who we think look like Ong and Ba... :)

It is so cute seeing her play with the dollshouse and hearing her talk to her little people and make then do things -















It's also hilarious seeing the unconventional things she does with the people and the furniture -


Here's Ong feeding baby Catherine in the shower -





And here's the wardrobe being converted into a car -





Last of all a pic of the big girl posing with her "enormous dollhouse" (her words... she thinks it's enormous...)





I have loved seeing how "into" her birthday she is this year... and have felt quite nostalgic about how grown up she is now... *sigh*... Just makes me feel so lucky to have such a wonderful daughter like her!

I'm knackered now after our exciting day so I'll put up more pics tomorrow of our birthday lunch and the birthday cake... :)

Dresses Are For Eating

Yum yum yum... :)

I quickly did up this storyboard of photos as a way of taking a break... I'm in the midst of processing photos for a newborn photoshoot I did a week ago for work colleague of Phan's... 3/4 way through the images... and I'm getting a taste of what it would be like if I ever went into business as a photographer... interesting that's for sure... I have discovered that whilst I adore little newborns and taking photos of them, processing them is a whole different ball game and has really challenged me!

Anyway... these photos are of Catherine wearing one of the many dresses she got as presents from her christening... She will quite happily sit and munch on her dress for 20 minutes by herself... makes for one drooly dress, but the main thing is she's happy!

I feel like I have a hundred and one things on my plate at the moment... so many things to do... so little time! Christmas is less than 8 weeks away!!! Elizabeth's birthday is less than 2 weeks away and she's having a party which is 3 weeks away (and what started out as a party for 2 has turned into a party for 10 after Elizabeth asked to invite her kindy friends!!!)... so there's planning for that to be done... Elizabeth is sooooo excited about her birthday this year... it's the first time she's really been excited about it... It's just adorable and hilarious... She keeps asking if we can have a party... a *big* one... and if we can write out invitations... and if we can hang up streamers... and if I can make her a chocolate cake... and can we have watermelon at the party too... LOL... you get the picture... the world revolves around her birthday for the moment

Catherine's Baptism

We welcomed Catherine into God's family this weekend... It has been a busy week leading up to it ... but in the end, the day was full of much beauty, love and joy and shared with our family and friends.

Phan's parents flew up on Friday night (Elizabeth had been counting down the sleeps until they arrived since Monday) and it was just so, so wonderful to have them here... I just loved seeing how happy they were to see the girls and seeing them play and cuddle with the girls just made my heart smile... Elizabeth loved having them here to play with... She was up at 6:15am on Saturday morning at the same time that Ong woke up... Apparently the first thing she did when she saw him was give him a big hug! Ong Ba loved getting cuddles and kisses in with Catherine too... I've got some casual photos of them which I'll have to share later.

Catherine in her christening dress (it's the same dress that Elizabeth wore are her baptism):

Family Photo - excuse the grumpy big girl... she was just grumpy for no reason and we couldn't snap her out of her bad mood!





Some photos from the service taken courtesy of our talented friend Ko (thanks Ko, you were fabulous!)... -























After the service, we had a great big lunch get together back at our place... we had so much food (which I forgot to take a photo of!), but Phan's mum had made and brought up frozen spring rolls, stuffed chicken wings, and sugar cane prawn... It was awesome having catering from interstate! I had made a vegetarian quiche, and 4 kinds of salad (potato salad, pasta salad, garden salad and baby spinach salad) and we had a few sizzle steaks and sausages too... Oh and I was rather chuffed with how the christening cake turned out (and it tasted pretty good too...)-





(I'll have to write a blog post about "Project Christening Cake" at some point... but just let me share with you that there was approx 2.5kg of chocolate involved in that 26 inch cake!)

And couple of extra photos -

Vicky, Catherine's godmother got her this -





and this:





Aren't they just beautiful? I love, love, love them and I'm sure Catherine will love them just as much as she gets older... (Elizabeth also loves the train!)

And this gorgeous signature bear and some other things from all the family -





All in all, it was a wonderful day... Sad to see Ong Ba go home today, but it'll be Christmas before we know it!