This is going to be a fairly short post, because the time I’d allocated to blog (daughter gone round to her friend’s for tea) has been eaten up with trying to source the correct size and shape cake tins to bake a magic fairy toadstool birthday cake, and some fairy figurines to decorate it. Lakeland has (hopefully) provided the cake tins, and I’m seeing them as an investment – surely there’ll be future igloos, ladybirds, hedgehogs etc which will make good use of them? The fairy figures are still elusive, although I am watching a couple of items on Ebay.

As you might have gathered, there’s a certain very important 5th birthday coming up and, although there’s over a month to go, Anna and I are both slightly obsessed with the party. I kid you not, my wedding didn’t take this much planning. I don’t think my husband has had a conversation with either of us in the past week which hasn’t reverted back to it. You see, the thing is, after last year’s party I vowed that this year would be a much simpler affair, a handful of children, at home, blah, blah, blah. Then Anna produced the list of 20 children she wanted to invite. I gulped a little, but decided to go with it. After all, 5 is a bit of a milestone birthday (isn’t it??), and I want to encourage her to make new friends in school, so a largeish party is probably a good thing. If nothing else, organising a 5th birthday extravaganza might divert my thoughts from my own 33rd birthday, which is a mere matter of weeks away.

The thought of 2o children to entertain for two hours caused major hyperventilation, so I decided to outsource that part of it, and have booked an entertainer. Now it’s just the invitations, decorations, food, cake, party bags and general co-ordination to worry about. When my brother and I were little, my mum had a cake decorating book, and before every birthday we were allowed to look through and choose the cake we wanted. She’s a very lovely mum, and this (insanely) generous gesture led to her having to produce, amongst other things, a tractors, a family of butterflies, and an elephant. I really wanted to do the same for my daughter, and so I bought the fab Australian Women’s Weekly book of children’s cakes. Anna has chosen a fairy toadstool. Wish me luck…I’m sure this cake is going to feature here again over coming weeks…

In between imitating Pippa Middleton (Well, kind of.She does party planning, doesn’t she?) I’ve been stripping. Our spare room is covered in fairly hideous woodchip paper which has clearly been there since 1972 and has been painted over several times. I was suddenly seized with an evangelical DIY fervour and decided it must be stripped and painted, and now, after two days of intensive stripping and only approximately 1/6 of the room woodchip free I’m starting to regret my decision slightly. However, it’s gone too far to stop now, so I just have to plough on. Guess that sorts my weekend plans out quite easily. And I’ve borrowed a steam thingie (the technical term) from a very kind friend, and that does make it easier, as well, as she pointed out, as giving me a free facial. Smooth walls and clear pores, it doesn’t get much better than that, surely?