Finally Finished!

Emily has at last finished her huge "seasons" canvas/acrylic painting. She did summer and winter months ago but finally yesterday she did spring and autumn.
You can't really see from the photo but spring was meant to be in a very loose, squiggly style with splattered rain drops on it. I really like the perspective and colours in autumn.

Today Emily's lost her voice thanks to a persistent little cold that we all can't get rid of. She and Jon went off to two Christmas Fayres this morning and came back with various goodies. Apparently lots of ladies from tai chi had stalls there and made a big fuss of Emily, bless 'em. We must get a stall at the next one.

Yesterday my Mum took the big cats to the vets for their booster vaccinations and to find out more about what on earth is happening to Merlin, who is now so thin that it's really awkward to pick him up without hurting him. He's going back first thing on Monday morning for a further round of blood tests and liver function tests. Yesterday evening the poor thing had diarrhea all over our sitting room floor. He's constantly eating but since they've ruled out thyroid and diabetes they now think it could be something with his liver that's stopping him absorbing food properly. Emily's PC up here has a photo screensaver on it and recently it's been showing a lot of photos of Merlin in the last lot of snow we had, so I guess that would be about 11 months ago. He was never a fat cat but the difference between how healthy he looked then and how poorly he looks now is shocking :-((

Work wise we're plodding on through an ever increasing work load. Our run of bad luck with our business bank continues, as they've decided to bounce yet another cheque to a supplier despite the fact that by the time the statement had updated to show the bounce (and the hefty fee) it was also showing the several thousand pounds in that would have covered the cheque if only it had been 12 hours earlier. Ridiculous. What with several corporate customers being so late in paying us and a hugely long run of payments arriving just 24 hours too late, it's been a traumatic couple of months, but we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now.

With only a few days to go until December I guess we'd better get up in the loft and find Emily's advent calendar box thingy. This year the advent fairy's going to bring her a colletion of Harry Potter collectable badges in the little drawers instead of choccies ;-) so we're looking forward to seeing her enjoying that. After much thought and soul searching, we've decided against having an 8th birthday party after all. With the cashflow situation as it is, we simply couldn't afford both that and the riding lessons we'd promised Emily, so we sat her down and explained things and asked her to choose. Very sensibly, imo, she chose the riding lessons, and fortunately didn't seem in the slightest bit bothered at not having a party after all. Which is a huge weight off our minds. I'd already got lots of HP themed decorations etc so we'll still decorate everything up and I think we'll do a Harry Potter type task/treasure hunt thingy for her so she's got some games to play before finding her pressies. And a fab birthday tea with all the family, obviously!

Seven!!

The long awaited day finally arrived - Emily was 7 years old yesterday :-))

I think (I hope!) she had an absolute ball. We started the day off with a big bunch of helium balloons tied to her bed for when she woke up. Normally she opens her birthday presents up here in the sitting room on birthday morning, but since we'd spent all New Year's Day decorating the downstairs dining room into a Snow Princess' Grotto, we'd laid out her presents down there for her - she'd been banned from the room whilst it was being decorated, so it was a huge surprise for her.

We had white sheeting on the carpet at the top half of the room, and we'd completely lined the wall/bookcases with white sheeting too, with gold and silver snowflakes spray painted on, and there were lots and lots of balloons in silver, white, ice blue and lilac and masses of ceiling decorations and stick on snowflakes everywhere, and little icicle fairy lights and hanging glass icicles. Took a hell of a long time to do, but to see Emily's face yesterday morning made every minute worthwhile!

Here she is early in the morning with a pile of presents, looking rather overwhelmed, lol:

She was thrilled to bits with her birthday presents, which included a scooter (which best friend Romy also had for Christmas, so hopefully they can have great fun playing together on those!) and a sewing machine as well as some Winx Club items and other bits and bobs. Emily spent the rest of the morning playing with new stuff, while Jon and I ran about like extremely mad mad things. The last minute rush was NOT helped by the fact that I rather stupidly overdid it with the wine on New Year's Eve and spent all New Year's Day feeling very sick and sleepy.....birthday planning with a hangover is not to be recommended!!

Finished decorating Emily's birthday cake with about an hour to spare - here's a pic. The icing wasn't yellow, it was creamy white. Flippin' camera. Heart shaped chocolate marbled cake with creamy white icing, white chocolate snowflakes round the edges, lilac icing snowflakes and white stars, to match the colour scheme. It was rather scrummy, surprised myself with that one:

The theme for this party was that the grumpy old snow queen had decided to keep winter all for herself; it was the job of the Snow Princess (Emily) and her snowflake fairies (guests) to change her mind, prove how much everyone loves the beauty of winter, and bring winter back to the world. Wanted to make it a kind of magical adventure, so we planned nine tasks they had to complete to develop the story. Wrote lots of "letters from the snow queen" on rolled up snowflake paper to look like scrolls tied with silver ribbon and hid them around the room - the girls had to find the write scroll with each set of instructions on it, and then find what they needed to do the task, then do it. All the things they needed for the various games and crafts were wrapped in silver foil packages and hidden too, so there was a fair bit of preparation required!

Romy and Hazel came over early in the afternoon so the girls could play and Hazel could give us a hand with getting food ready etc. Emily was over the moon with the lovely presents Romy gave her, including quite possibly the world's biggest birthday card, complete with lots of little envelopes on the inside cover each housing a really thoughtful and touching little pressie - a CD with all the existing photos of Romy and Emily together, handdrawn little fairies, rosebuds and all sorts of lovely bits. Absolutely gorgeous!
Here's Snow Princess Emily and Chief Snowflake Fairy Romy just before the party began:

Then before we knew it, it was party time! Altogether, we played musical snowflake clusters, made snowflake photo frames, played a snowflake race, pass the snowball, made beaded snowflake hanging decorations, stick the snowflake on the winter picture, snowstorm statues, made winter charm bracelets/necklaces, and went on a magical gemstone hunt. Inside a cracker we put little silver bags each containing one of six types of gemstone with a symbol on it. Each girl then had to go and hunt for the remaining five so each ended up with a complete set of six different gems plus a scroll showing the gemstone names and meanings. The hunt took place in the sitting room, to give us a chance to set up birthday tea.

We had birthday tea by candelight with an ice lantern Emily made and lots of little candles around the room. After that, the Snow Queen's last letter told the girls that she was delighted they'd proved her wrong and changed her mind, and that if they all danced under the pinata, it could snow....and so it did, as we'd filled it with fake snow and confetti bursters instead of sweeties. (And boy did it take some clearing up last night....) Note Emily in the foreground of this picture putting even more snow in her hair....everyone had a great snowfight with it before going home!

Have some great photos of the party but it's just occurred to me that I didn't ask permission from guests' parents to post them. Posting the above as it seems pretty harmless but **of course** if anyone objects please just tell me and I'll delete it straight away. Won't post any others until I have permission from those concerned.

After the party, Emily had yet more pressies to open from grandparents, all of which were lovely, lovely, lovely. Finished the day with a nice bath using her new floating bath lights, which really did quite a magical effect - just as well, as a bath was definitely needed to get the last of the snow out of Emily's hair!

It dawned on us with some considerable sadness in the run up to Christmas and as we were planning the party that this could be the last year that Emily was really entranced with the magic of Christmas, in the way only young children are, and perhaps the last year too that she would really want a magical/fairytale kind of party. I hope not, but from now on it might be just a trip to the cinema or somesuch. She's growing up so fast. Of course that's wonderful in one way - but where has our little girl gone? Oh well, at least it helped to reinforce our determination to really enjoy Emily being seven....before we know it, it will have passed forever. Going to pull all the stops out to make her year of being seven absolutely as magical as possible :-))