"It's party time in London"

I was going to take a picture of the obscenely huge pile of presents that Joseph received on Friday night as his guests filtered into his party at his favourite venue.

The evening was a joint venture between him and his closest pal whose birthday is a couple of weeks earlier than his. So actually, what I should have done was taken a picture of the two obscenely huge piles of presents that awaited the celebrating pair when their friend’s had filtered out, cheeks rosy and with sweaty hair matted to their foreheads; the marks of a good evening’s entertainment.

If you’re 6 years old that is.

Actually, scratch that; I had many a terrific evening which was gauged by how rosy my cheeks were and how sweaty my hair was and that was in my 20's!

But I digress …..

The venue was a ‘soft play’ centre and thanks to a few extra pounds, we had exclusive use of it which made a big difference to the kid’s enjoyment. We’ve been to the place before and believe me, the amount of tears that usually takes place is significant. Yes, yes, I know that our little cherubs have got to get used to mixing it with older kids, and they either do it at a place like this or they do it at the swing park, or the school playground etc but the one place you definitely don’t want them having a hard time is at their own birthday party. And apart from the padding around the climbing frames and slides, there really isn’t much that is “soft” about this play centre.

At least on Friday they only had others of the same age to contend with and that was ok by us.

I think in total there were just over 30 children which is gonna make for one big headache trying to find a new home for all his new, oversized toys.

This weekend also found the carpenter at our place for (another) two days with me offering my invaluable assistance and, as boring as it is spending a weekend doing DIY, “we” did get the cupboards finished which was great. The downside to assisting a carpenter working on your bespoke cupboards is that you don’t get to play with your children, one of whom had just taken delivery of half of all the toys in the store.

I did feel pretty mean.

Every time I walked past him, he said, “can you play with me Dad?”

“Not just yet Poops, when the carpenter has gone”,

which turned into;

“Has he gone yet Dad?”.

"No Poops, not yet, nearly though".

As a casual observer, I would have to say the most, how shall I say, unusual present he received, was a garden bird feeder.

“We thought we would get him something a little bit different”, the mother bearing the gift said to me.

"Er, thank you. It was certainly different".

(pic to follow)