The birthday review!

Laila 5 years old

So my big girl turned 5 years old last Saturday. It's so strange how much more grown up she seems now she's 5! It's all perspective I think, I don't think she actually changed overnight but she seems taller, older, better behaved and a bit more sensible!

Last year she had 4 separate birthday celebrations and kept telling everyone she had 4 birthdays because she was 4! So to avoid that escalating this year, we did our best to concentrate the celebrations into one long and very tiring weekend! We had to cancel our trip to Francois' brothers the weekend before in Chartres because they had 20cm of snow and we had 2cm of black ice! That trip was supposed to be a family celebration as 2 of Laila's cousins have birthdays in January too.

Cakes for school class

So the actual celebrations consisted of, taking cakes to school on Thursday to share with her class, having 7 friends over on Saturday afternoon for birthday goûter, Grandma and Granddad came for the weekend to help out, we had friends for dinner on Saturday night and then Papy and Mamy came on Sunday so we all went out for lunch!

Laila has always been a huge fan of birthdays, everyone's birthday is important to her. But what I noticed this year is that for her the most important part of any birthday is the CAKE! She didn't once ask about presents, talk about what she might be given or tell us what she really wanted (unlike Christmas where she was very demanding). Her only demands were that she must absolutely have the "merry-go-round" cake!

Merry go round cake

She did get some lovely presents though, a watch, an alarm clock which turns green when it's ok to get up and also teaches her how to tell the time. A doll that she really wanted for Christmas and Santa didn't bring it, some gorgeous clothes, junior scrabble and the Cuisto Dingo game she also wanted at Christmas. Her friends all brought nice creative things (on my advice) so she got an Aquarellum painting set, a 3D card making kit, stickers, a really great book full of ideas for drawing, and a very cute Strawberry Shortcake doll (Charlotte aux fraises in French). Lots of things to keep a busy girl busy!