A Birthday & Lots of Splashes!

Thursday was Jon's birthday :-))

It was also a very busy day, between tai chi in the morning, work being rather manic and then drama in the afternoon. With remarkable patience, Emily waited until a very late tea time to give Daddy his presents and lots of home made cards.

Next week at tai chi Jon and Emily should be getting their certificates, so Emily came home very excited from the lesson to tell me all about that. After a quick lunch, we set about making Daddy's birthday cake - diabetic friendly (well almost) Honey and Almond cake adapted from this Honey & Hazelnut Cake recipe. Emily decorated it to look like an artist's palette :-))

She finished decorating it just in the nick of time to go out to drama, where this week the children were given details of the costumes they need for their plays. Since Emily's being the fox she just needs either a black leotard or black tshirt and black shorts, with tail and ears to be provided by the academy. Should be no problem there then, can't move for black in her drawers at the moment, lol. She also emerged from the lesson clutching her copy of the script to practice at home.

Back home for birthday tea and pressies. Apart from various world cup related bits and bobs, we bought Jon this Art Diploma Course which should keep him out of mischief for the next twelve months!! (If he can perform minor miracles and find some time to do it in, that is - but we're working on that.)

This morning we finally found a minute to dig out the paddling pool from the back of the spider infested shed, and we also set up a water slide thingy with fountains which spray all over it. Needless to say Emily was well and truly soaked long before we left to pick Romy up for a play this afternoon. The two girls spent a whole three and half hours out in the garden - I've no idea exactly what they were up to but it was certainly wet!!

Emily's into the world cup in a big way at the moment, so after playing with Romy she settled straight down to watch the opening match; she also watched the Poland-Ecuador match this evening and duly noted down both results on her wallchart.

Emily got her first book to review for the EO magazine in the post today. We asked to be reviewers ages ago, but that request must have fallen by the wayside. Jon asked again a week ago, and we seem to be on board now. The book that's arrived is The Telling Pool which is a novel by David Clement-Davies. It's clearly aimed at teenagers-adults, so I'm not quite sure why we've been sent it.....but it looks like an interesting read, anyway. It's set in Richard the Lionheart times and seems to be about a combination of wicca and christianity with folklore, legend and King Arthur thrown in for good measure. At 300+ pages of extremely tiny type, I'm not at all sure Emily will have time to read it before the end of June when the review is apparently due, but bless her, she's trying and has already read the first chapter tonight.

Something else she's been enjoying recently is The Lottie Project by Jacqueline Wilson. Up until now Emily's been quite averse to J.W. - I think possibly because she thought all her books were like Tracy Beaker, the TV series of which she can't stand - but she's really taken with this one, so it'll be interesting to see whether she now wants to read more by the same author.

As far as tomorrow goes, ballet rehearsals and more ballet rehearsals, plus an England match, plus the garden and the all important paddling pool - there's lots vying for Emily's attention and never enough time!