1st birthday preparations!

I can't believe that NEXT MONTH my baby will be ONE! I can't wait! Jonathan and I have started making preparations for it, and it's so exciting! We never bother with birthday parties for us, but I'm so excited to do Robert's :) We have come up with an invitation list. We initially did 3 separate lists, a definites list (close family and friends) followed by a secondary list (some furthur out family, like Robert's great-aunts and uncles, and some of my step family who we are close to), followed by a tertiary list (a few internet friends), but in the end we decided to just go for the definites list. Including Jonathan, Robert and I, there will be 24 people, 4 of which will be children. If we had invited the secondary and tertiary lists too there would have been 50 people had all accepted! (but the percentage of children would have been higher! As the tertiary list had 7 children in it alone out of 3 families!)

We have decided to host his party at Jonathan's parents house, as they have a very large bungalow, with 4 rooms people can go in, including a large lounge, a large kitchen, a dining room and a garden room. We have asked Jonathan's parents and they seem really chuffed :) I was expecting a more reserved "ok" but no, they seem excited about it! Hehe! They also have plenty of parking space. The only possible problem will be people locating it ;) So maps and directions are a must I think, as well as balloons at the end of the drive, and possibly the end of the roads leading up to it! They live in a small village just south of Northampton, and their house is at the top of a long drive off the road which they are part of, if that makes sense!!

Last night I made some invitation cards, the card parts anyhow, with a nice graphic I made on the front, what needs to be done now is the inside, which I'll print on ordinary paper and stick inside the card (It'll look more posh that way, and it'll make sure that the cards don't get mucked up in the printer if I put them the wrong way in or whatever! :) I'm so pleased with them already, the image I made looks great (if I do say so myself! LOL!), and I can't wait to send them out.

I can't wait to get baking a cake for Robert's party, although I will have to do a test run as I'm not too great at cakes I don't think! And then think how to decorate it, and then think about house decorations!

We are going to have it the day before Robert's birthday, on Sunday 22nd November. It's my nephew's birthday on Saturday 28th November so they're having a party for him then, so we're having Robert's the weekend before. We will go over to Jonathan's parents on the Saturday so we can spend the day doing party preparations, and then sleep over, and put it all together in the morning while they're at chapel.

This weekend we went to my parents in Kent, and we also found the time to pop in on my grandparents, as they have never met Robert before, and as they are quite old, it was very high priority as they might not live much longer (my Grandad is 93 this year I think, and my nan is 90 in a couple of weeks). They are both very frail physically, my grandad has cataracts and is very thin and frail, and my nan has muscle wastage. But seeing them with Robert was lovely! My nan was so animated and energetic (!), holding his hands and "dancing" with him. It really was lovely to see them like that. They did their usual trick of trying to force biscuits, cakes and money on us (!). They absolutely loved him :) We got lots of photos of them with him, although my nan insisted on having her headscarf on for photos of the three of them as she thought her hair looked dreadful (lol, I thought it looked great considering she's 90 years old!). I can't wait for Jonathan to sort them out.

We also have some good photos of Robert at Mum's house. She's really doing well at getting it all sorted, the lounge and kitchen look great, and they told us all about their plans for the back garden, which sounds lovely! A big decked area, a pond in one corner of the lawned area with a rockery opposite and lovely flower beds.

Robert was SO funny with the dogs! He absolutely LOVES animals, although the feeling isn't always mutual! The dogs are very warey of him, and would growl whenever he came too close, but luckily Dave had a brainwave and got one of the dogs' balls for Robert to hold, and although he's a bit young to get the concept of throwing it for them it did make them less warey of him! Robert was so funny with them though! At one point he was standing up in the gap between two chairs, and one of the dogs wanted to get past, so they nudged their way past him, and Robert just giggled away as it was like they were tickling his tummy! And another time, he was sitting playing with a ball of wool poking out of a bag, and Lady heard it rustle, and came along, sniffed his hand, and then went away again! Robert found this hilarious too and giggled away. It was so cute! He laughed so much at the dogs yesterday!

The other week, Jonathan spilt half a glass of juice all over his keyboard, so he unplugged it and swapped it for another one. The sticky keyboard he has decided to donate to Robert to play with, as Robert LOVES bashing away on keyboards!




As you can see he was highly excited about getting to play on a keyboard! Lol! Bless my little cheeky chappy! I love him so much!