Happy 6th Birthday Carl

Yesterday Carl finally turned six. I say finally because for him the wait, the suspense, the seemingly infinite number of days before 20 February rolled around have been an agony. Every nght for the past month he's asked "how many days left now?" when I've put him to bed at night. How long a year seems when you're an almost-six-year-old. The excitement reached it's peak on Friday, the day when he could celebrate at school. I love the photo above - even though it's blurry and side-on you can see the smile that never left his face all day.

There's that smile again - this time he's standing on his chair while all the kids sing happy birthday, led by his beloved teacher Wilma. He went to school dressed as a pirate, because the treats he shared out were pirate cakes. They looked brilliant, and the idea is from a site called Party Kids. I ended up making 50 of these, 30 for school and 20 for Scouts!!

One compensation was that I didn't have to make the birthday cake this year; the local baker did the honours, producing a dinosaur-topped confection that fitted the bill. I'd had a brilliant idea at New Years when fireworks were being sold; why not save some sparklers for on top of the kids birthday cakes! So I dug out the box I'd hidden away and poked two into the top of the cake. They seemed rather large...we lit the candles and sparklers and started singing Happy Birthday. The sparklers fizzed, sputtered...and then ignitied into flares! Bright intense flames shot up into the air, producing clouds of smoke and a shower of fine ash which descended onto the cake. We quickly pulled the kids back and could only watch stunned as the pyrotechnic show continued. Hubby thought to open the door to try and get the smoke out and I was very glad I'd reminded him to disable the smoke detectors before hand. Once the flares finally fizzled out we removed the chunks of burnt wrapping, scraped off the worst of the ash and continued. The house was filled with smoke and our guests probably all thought I was a complete idiot. However the kids thought it was brilliant and will be asking for a repeat performance for Niels birthday. It had seemed like a good idea at the time...