Sweet dreams...

Wow!

I meant to write on my blog every week, if not twice a week, and somehow a few weeks have gone by before I’ve realised.

Sorry about that!

A few weeks ago we celebrated Emily’s 5th birthday, bless her! Every year, my husband and I promised ourselves (or he insisted, I should say) we would not have a birthday party or at least we wouldn’t spend something like 500,00 Euros for it (like we've done all previous years!). But, you know, we’ve fallen into the spiral of these playgrounds with inflatable castles and trampolines which the kids truly love and at times make the lives of us parents easier…

Anyway, this year Emily went to a new school, an English school, so I thought she should have her birthday party so that she could invite her new friends and we could all - children and parents - get to know each other a bit more and ‘break the ice’. I somehow didn’t share my decision with my husband straight away to avoid unnecessary annoying exchanges of opinions that most likely wouldn’t have matched mine, I thought if I managed to get everything beautifully organised at a reasonable price he would definitely be more than happy that I had done so. I also thought I should really commit this time and make more of an effort, rather than just book an 'all-inclusive' playground package with food and drinks. I wanted to make it really nice and decided to arrange a so called sweet table which is becoming more and more popular in Italy. I contacted a few cake designers (oops…btw, I am really sorry for not having replied to a few quotes!!) but then I had a light bulb moment…I should make it myself! Was I or was I not, a prospective cake designer once? So, as it happens, I only needed to google ‘Minnie Mouse sweet table’ before I had tens and tens of pictures of cupcakes, pop-cakes, birthday cakes and everything-else-cakes to be inspired by. I pulled all the boxes down from the highest shelves where I had once stored all my cake design tools for good. I was getting very excited again and wondered why it took so long for me to get back on my beloved cakes. It took nearly a week to get all the Minnie Mouse little fondant faces and bows done, bake the biscuits to give the children after the party, order everything on Amazon with plenty of time so that could be delivered in time from the paper cloth for the table to the dotted lattix balloons (and useless balloon sticks) etc. I remember panicking minutes before having to leave the house to go the venue because I couldn’t find the red dotted straws which were meant to go in the little juice bottles that I had decorated with Emily’s name and number 5. I did know I had put them somewhere to hide from the kids who would have got them and wasted them otherwise (20 ridiculous dotted straws cost me 7.45 Euros!). I just didn’t manage to find them and, eventually, I replaced them with the vulgar red straws from Todis (those straws with the bendy bit) that we use everyday.

To cut it short, I had a pretty good looking 3 metre long sweet table with food enough to feed 40 kids along with their parents - and grandparents - except our guests where much fewer than that and the little ones didn’t really seem to be that impressed. They spent the whole time jumping on the trampoline and occasionally came to the other room to have some juice which somehow they’d rather have from the big plastic bottle (from Todis too) on the drinks table than have the sweetest Minnie Mouse decorated bottles nicely displayed on the sweet table. I’m glad I had saved all the lids, which my husband and I placed back on each bottle so that we could bring them back home together with a number of boxes and bags full of toys, drinks and food. You should have seen our house when we came back home, it looked like someone had just broken into and just searched anywhere to find treasure. I could only reinstate the kitchen to ‘manufacturer settings’ after a good ten days or so.

And yesterday, yes yesterday, my husband came up with the post he collected from our letter box, which I admit I don’t necessarily check every day, and to my surprise there was a small parcel which had the luxurious red dotted straws in it, which apparently not only didn’t turn up on time, but were obviously never hidden away from the kids. Madness is on its way.

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