Birthday season

I'm more stressed than i am at Christmas - June is fast becoming a horrible month! Not really, of course, but ours is a household in the grip of fever pitch excitement, which brings with it frayed tempers, a lot of fighting and a mother increasingly turning to drink to cope with it all! Jenna turns 4 tomorrow, and is having a morning tea party for her friends on Saturday, and Leah is 6 (6!! Where did that go?!) next Saturday and is going ice skating with a couple of friends from school.

We had a lovely bank holiday weekend for the Queen's birthday, it was very busy and we caught up with lots of people we haven't seen in a while. We were treated to dinner at Paddie's, went to a lovely farmer's market out in Clevedon, went to the beach and made sandcastles, and took our nephew to MOTAT, which was great fun and all the kids loved riding on the trams. I especially liked the aviation hanger, where they had an old plane that was the first to do the trip from Auckland to Southampton. Boy, we think we've got it bad having to fly 24 hours - it used to take 12 DAYS! Stuff that! Although they did have an awful lot more leg room than they do these days. But still, you'd have to REALLY want to get to England badly to do that mission.

Bad news for Leah yesterday; we had to take her to the orthodontist because she has an ectopic eruption, and turns out she needs a plate brace to correct it. My poor baby - i really wasn't anticipating braces at such a young age. This diagram (courtesy of www.uic.edu/classes/orla/orla312/VTM_4.gif) is the best i can find to explain it; basically her molars are growing at the wrong angle, and if they don't straighten them, the molars will erode the tooth in front, cause an infection and all go a bit pear shaped. And he told us that we should prepare ourselves that she will need fixed braces as a teenager. Time to start saving or take out a dental plan, methinks!

Anyhoo, will leave you with some photos of the weekend; will probably post some pics of the birthday girl tomorrow xxx