Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

My second birthday party, 7 May, 2011

It's my party and I'll dance if I want to!
Everything's all set up, the balloons are spread around, the music's on, now just waiting for the guests to arrive. Sparrow's in the lovely party outfit that Oma brought specially to dress her in. Which was lovely but unexpected - I'd told everyone to come in old clothes as we'd probably be doing messy stuff. Wasn't sure if that meant finger paints, playdough, icing their own cookies or what, but thought that a two-year-old's birthday party should be about activity and mess rather than dressing up. I didn't have the energy and time to make it happen though, it was going to be cold out in the sunroom and hard to clean up in the warm loungeroom, so the activities I organised were relatively tame. I did wish I'd got more organised about the messy though when Sparrow ended up being way more dressed up than everyone else. Not that she or any of them noticed. Next year, when I have working abdominal muscles. There will be paint, icing, texta and food colouring from head to toe... -grin-

And there are people! Willow and Mali are discovering some of the toy stashes while the dancing music sparkles in the air.

Sprawled around the loungeroom. James is holding Robin, Shay is holding Mali while Bev looks on, Ruth is feeding Henri. The ball pit is something we bought at the secondhand baby market the month before, and the box to the left is full of dressup clothes selected and donated from my own chest to Sparrow's new collection. I say new because she hadn't seen it before today, it was a surprise for her. I figured it was about time I made dressup stuff easily accessible, she's very much the right age. They had great fun pulling things out of it and discovering the various items.

More loungeroom sprawling and general viv-and-vim. L-R: Ruth (and Henrietta), Maggie (Oma), Clara with her mum Kath holding Alex (who is two months older than Robin), Gordon (Grandad) and James with Robin.

Darren, Alex, Lily and Zac made it here right at the end. Zac is the oldest of the newborns in our mothers group, and Alex is the wayfinder for the rest of us in dealing with the challenges of having two kids at once with this age gap. She gives us all plenty of warning of delights to come! That's Lily attempting to give Sparrow her birthday present, while Sparrow is busily ignoring the people and presents and attempting to claim every single carrot stick. Watching the two-year-olds deal with the concept of presents is fun, especially as all the ones here today have birthdays around about now so there's plenty of opportunity for confusion as to who is supposed to get the presents. Sparrow still hasn't really twigged to the idea of being given things specially, I think partly because she gets given things so often (even just by people we pass by on the street!) and there's always plenty of new stuff so the idea that presents are a treat hasn't had a chance to take hold yet.

Speaking of carrot sticks. Here's a quick shot of the food side of the operation. I had planned to do a brunch that extended into lunch, with some more solid food towards the end, but had very few people say they were definitely coming and those that did come arrived later rather than earlier making it hard to judge when to crank up the oven. So in the end I did a little less than I'd hoped and planned for. Easier on me, and there still seemed to be plenty to eat. The fruit and veg platters are always fun this time of year, I base it on whatever Sparrow's been keen on eating lately. So this year's platter has apple, pear, beans (it MUST have beans), sweet potato sticks, carrot sticks, cucumber, mandarin, kiwi fruit and persimmon. She hasn't been that consistently keen on the persimmon but I like it so I added it in anyway. They're lovely in season now. She's been eating "kiwifruchte" (kiwi fruit) like nothing else so that had to be included - but then she refused to touch any of it today. -shrug- Who knows what's in the mind of a two-year-old. The main item served for brunch was waffles with bananas and chocolate icecream. Which had sounded great in theory but I hadn't actually thought through the practicalities of how to serve it. You really need something the kids can hold, and icecream and banana on waffle hearts is not the easiest of finger foods to manage (not to mention prepare). But manage we did. I ended up walking around the room with the waffles and banana in one hand and the icecream container in the other (so fancy!) getting people to make their own. The heartier food (hot vegie fingers and mole-style chicken ribs) we ended up having for dinner instead.

Sparrow is sitting next to me as I prepare this page pointing at this photo and saying "Birthday cake!" And now she's demanding that we have birthday cake. I think there is room for development of the concept that cake is cake and birthdays are birthdays, and that cake on a birthday is birthday cake but you can have cake other days too. Or something. She seems to remember the event though. The other two little girls sitting with her had trouble not diving straight into the cake or blowing out the candles for her, seeing as that's a trick they've learnt to do in the last couple of weeks but Sparrow had no idea. Instead my little scientist is reaching out to stick her finger in the candle to see what happens. And, being a good little scientist, she did it twice just to check if it was the same the second time.

Here's a close up of the cake, taken the day before when I made it. I went for a stars and moon theme, or sky theme, because Sparrow's so fascinated with things in the sky at the moment. Moon, stars, planes, helicopters are all met with incredible excitement. She hadn't really got the difference between planes and copters though so Mum had suggested adding a toy of each to the toy car collection. I thought that sounded great. So here's our stars and moon cake with a toy plane and toy copter. Notice the incredibly elegant serving dish. That's my nice big baking dish there. I forgot to grease it when I poured the cake batter in, and it was a nice moist pear cake but not very deep, so it stuck very well to the bottom and it wasn't able to be got out. I just decided to serve it in the pan and assume people wouldn't care too much about the state their pieces arrived in, given that most of the cake eaters would be under the age of three. The cake ended up not getting eaten very much. I think the blue-black icing put people off a bit, especially once the cake pieces had come out of the pan all raggedy and squished leaving their bottom halves behind. It really was a mess. But a very tasty one. Sparrow took one bite of her piece then carefully put it somewhere and went and picked up all the sweet potato sticks and walked off with them. I've taught her well. Or maybe she's taught herself.