Apoa can move on now from updating us daily on how many days to her birthday, since it's now three hundred and sixy three days to go. We had a really nice celebration, starting with a few kids coming for cake after school on Friday and then going back to primary school for international evening, which was great and fitted in pretty well with my equal opportunities training. I guess 'celebrating diversity' would be the buzzword way of describing it. It was a free, nonfundraising event where everybody brought a dish, we all ate them, and a few groups put on entertainment. The highlights were the caipirinhas, the feast and an amazing group of Turkish dancers accompanied by a circular-breathing pipe player and an awesome drummer (sorry - didn't find out much about the names of instruments etc.) Then it was back home for a sleepover (11 kids, counting Kiloh and Anna) with the DVD of Princess Diaries 2. The grownups didn't bother with the movie. I was particularly put off by the cgi people who looked like leftovers from the deck of the Titanic

Yesterday we served them pancakes and then Ohna took them swimming, meeting up with the nonsleeping over guests at the pool, while I did the lastminute shopping and raced back to tidy up the house and cook. Naturally, the cash machines on Green Lanes were all broken but I managed in the end, diving round to Londis for a couple of postlastminute supplies. It was a carb-heavy meal and they got through an impressive amount of pasta and various forms of bread. They did eat some veg as well, though (yes, we're a bit uptight about this now, thanks to Jamie) I'm off to Londis now so they can have a sandwich when they get back from circus school.

Yesterday evening's DVD was Bridget Jones 2 which was also fairly disappointing. I'm not sure how much of its worseness was to do with it being the second one and how much was to do with it being worse. Anyway, the grownups have a say in the next choice so we're going for Anchorman which sounds much more promising.

B-)