Butterflies for the Birthday Girl! Tons of Photos :-)

It's been a wonderful New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, culminating with Emily's 9th birthday yesterday, 2nd January :-))

Emily had a "magical, perfect" day, in her words and is extremely pleased to be nine. Late on New Year's Day, with Nana and Gramps' help, we decorated our big room with loads of hanging down butterflies, daisies, metallic swirls and flowers, plus birthday banners and balloons. Emily knew we were decorating, but she didn't know what the "theme" was going to be. We put all her presents piled up on the table downstairs, and I added lots of little butterflies I'd been collecting for a while, plus a beautiful feathered peacock model and a little feathered bird. We also hung up a gorgeous pink and purple sparkly curtain across the door. While Jon played with Emily upstairs, I also started work on making her birthday cake, which was a two tier heart shaped chocolate sponge cake, covered in chocolate fudge icing and stunning edible butterflies :-))

Photo-fest coming up! [Edit: Blogger seems to have helpfully squashed all my pictures. Wail. But you can click on them to see better!]

Firstly the decorations; not captured all that well on camera, but it did look very, very pretty :-) Poor Gramps fell backwards off the dining room table into a bookcase putting this lot up!! Fortunately only his pride was damaged ;-)



And here's lots of the Beautiful Birthday Girl herself:







Emily was a very lucky nine year old indeed and enjoyed lots of presents. Hot favourites were this Fashion Design Studio Set plus a ton of fabric pieces, lace, ribbons, sequin trims, fabric glue, velcro, cottons etc from me and Daddy, this rather yummy Candy Factory set from Nana and Gramps plus a Carmen Girls colour and style hair kit from Grandad with tongs for various curls etc plus dozens of coloured hair extensions and a heated tool for putting them in. Here's the fashion designer getting straight to work, lol:
After much playing, it was eventually time for birthday tea :-)




Ringlets from using Emily's new hair tool, plus Barbies of Ancient Greece and the Viking world, who have been firm favourites since Christmas, lol:


Going back in time, I'm going to add some pictures of New Year's Eve, too, since we had such a lovely family evening, staying up and playing games with Nana and Gramps. Grandad refused to join in - as normal. Here's Emily being bingo caller and generally looking gorgeous as usual.



On New Year's Day we had a lovely family lunch too, prepared by Nana and Gramps, and Hazel and Romy popped round to deliver some lovely birthday presents for Emily :-)

Jonathan has been really, really poorly for the last four or five days. He's had the same bug as everyone else, but it's not that any more, it's turned into something much nastier. He's got a burning chest that makes it hard to breathe and he keeps being sick too, and he's had a cough for months and months, plus stomach pain now too. He really needs to get to the GP, but at the moment he's too busy running errands for his Dad. Some things never change.

Meanwhile, back in the real world post birthday excitement, today I've taken Grandad to the eye clinic at the hospital. It was a two hour wait once we got there (because he insisted on getting there nearly 45 mintues early), and we actually saw the doctor for less than five minutes. They said everything was stable and to come back in three months. Which was of course duly pronounced "a bloody waste of time" by Grandad. A waste of ***who's*** time, exactly? Mine, certainly. Emily's, yes, as she missed out on stuff we were going to do this afternoon. The doctor's even. But not his - he was the one who'd been moaning and complaining because he hadn't had the appointment. So now he's had one, and he's still not happy. Still, he wants a GP appointment now for next week. Clearly starting 2008 as he means to go on. He has in fact been extremely difficult throughout Christmas, new year and Emily's birthday - refusing to join in anything, moaning about the food etc. Didn't want any input into Emily's birthday present "from" him - didn't chose it, wasn't there when it was ordered, wasn't interested when it arrived, didn't wrap it up, didn't want to know. Paid for it in the sense of allowed his switch card to be used, yes, but emotional investment in his granddaughter now equals zero. Didn't even write her a birthday card. But there you go.

I'm going to try to find the positive this year, I said. It may take me a while to find the positive over "certain situations" like the above. But at least Emily's had a fab start to the year, which is something to celebrate :-) And she still has her party on the 12th January to come :-))