phew.......

And it's all over! It was a complete success, despite the fact that i did exactly what i said i wouldn't and drank too much wine last night and woke up with a dreadful hangover! Turns out blowing up balloons and drinking wine and gossiping with girlfriends into the wee hours ISN'T the best way to spend the night before a childrens' party!! Doh! It did relax me though and we had fun, so it didn't really matter.

All 12 kids turned up in the end, despite me thinking that not everyone was going to make it, i had a few phone calls at 5pm lat night saying "oh, by the way, we ARE coming, sorry i didn't ring before...." ! So it was pretty daunting, with 14 kids in our small lounge, but they were all great. We ate first, and they all loved the dinosaur cakes and cookies. Then we played pin ( or stick, should i say, i didn't trust any of them with pins!) the tail on the dinosaur, followed closely by a game i had made up. This deserves it's own paragraph....

I had originally devised a game whereby i blew and decorated 14 eggs and buried them in sand and they could all do a little fossil dig, and whoever had the egg with a slip of paper in it won the prize. Adrian, luckily, has a lot more sense than me and pointed out that it was a crazy idea to have sand in the lounge, and so bought home a whole load, i mean a giant bin bag full, of shredded paper from work and we'd do it in that instead. I went to blow the eggs last night and gave up very quickly because a) it was really quite gross putting my mouth on an egg, all i could think about was that it had come out of a chicken's bum.... and b) it was way too difficult, so we used balloons instead, put them in a big trough and covered them with mounds of shredded paper to make a dinosaur's nest, and it looked great. So then it comes to the bit where i tell them to all choose an "egg" and bring it to me to pop it and see if they had won a prize. Well, do you think ANY of them were interested what was in the balloons? They couldn't care less, it was the shredded paper they were into, and oh god, it got EVERYWHERE!! If only i could download the video of 14 kids in a sea of shredded paper in my lounge and all the mothers just standing by looking kind of stunned.....i had to just pretend it was all a purposeful thing and i had of course planned for the kids to throw paper everywhere! It was hilarious though and they were just in their element, every single one of them, even the little ones who had been feeling a bit shy, were right in there chucking it at the others; it was priceless.

We did pass the parcel and musical statues and then a bit of mad dancing to The Wiggles at the end, and that was that. Won't be doing it again in a hurry, but really glad we did it because they all had a really great time, and several people have rung this evening to say thank you and that they had a lovely time, so i think that's a good measure of a fab party and i feel very pleased with myself :) Am now off to collapse on the sofa, i am KNACKERED. Will leave you with some pics of the cake, meant to be a dinosaur island, and leah and her kindy friends. nighty night! xxx