My baby has grown up

So...................we didnt go camping. I'm glad we were here for Meave's party last night and her birthday today. It took all the time after coming back from ballet to tidy up enough of the house to have a party in. Many push-along/ride toys were shoved under the stairs! And make the cake, which didn't take too long. So I manged to cram a black forest gateau in the already full fridge, along with a bottle of champagne. The first to arrive were two of her girl friends, who brought, yes, a multi-layered chocolate cake (pictured) and another bottle of champagne! which was nice of them. I wasn't bothered about being upstaged- all the more left over for today. She had been quite worried about having a party, about keeping the kids awake, but we moved the sound system into the kitchen, which is below her room, and it could hardly be heard from the other bedrooms, strangely. The kids stayed up till about 9.30 and were asleep by about 10. We hid in the office room, watching Glasto on the telly, helped by copious amounts of G & T and nibbles, which I had to keep sneaking in for. I missed them singing happy birthday and opening champagne at midnight, but I guess this was something I had to leave for her to share with her friends. She said later that she enjoyed her party: not too many people, but enough to make it feel like a party.
We had today, anyway. I spent the morning helping Jem finish off some presents she had sewn, whilst talking to my mum, who's calls I had not returned in over a week. (my dad had suggested that I must have gone to Glastonbury and she had images of me floating around in water with all my kids!). By the time she emerged some of Jem's friends had appeared on bikes. So, after coffee and toast in the garden I manged to offload some of the monster cake on willing children, and share out the remaining champagne between the five adults there. She opened some of her presents from the children. There was a definate drinks theme to her presents: from cappucino sprinkler sets to a smoothie maker, etc. She didn't mind the domestic nature of most of the gifts- she is hoping to leave home quite soon, so I suppose it was all quite appealing.
We went out for a walk in the afternoon, (not with Maeve and boyf, who went to the pub). One of Jem's frinds had invited her over and I wanted to look at a few open studios and other arts festival stuff. So Jem and I split off on the way down, to her friends, and the boys went with daddy to the first open studio, except I had told him the wrong place, and when I got there I had to go and find out where it was. I called at an old friend's open studio,which was ineresting (maybe blog more about this another day). I finally found the one we were supposed to be going to and it was closed and I had just missed them! So I headed off to pick Jem up, who had fallen in the river, but we managed to catch the bus home and get the tea on before anyone else got back. We had the black forest gateau and sang happy birthday, which the kids had been long awaiting.
I gave Meave another present tonight: a blog! I sent it her on MSN, and after changing the name and profile, etc she came downstairs to discuss the nature of blogging. Hmmm..............