Age = 1 year 5 days
Saturday was Linus’s first birthday, and it was a big event for our little family.
Guests
We decided that the birthday would be focused around children, photos and cake from 12-2pm, and then adults could enjoy a barbecue over the rest of the afternoon. This meant that people arrived and left at all sorts of different times. Family members were around virtually all day, but some friends stayed for a few hours while others just popped in briefly to give us their best wishes. Every visit was appreciated, and I’m glad so many people were able to share in Linus’s big day!
Entertainment
Our family arrived back from a two week holiday in the North Island just 18 hours before guests for Linus’s party were due to arrive. I started to stress a little about organising the day, but decided that the most important thing was not how tidy the house was or how well fed the guests were, but how much the day was devoted to Linus.
And for that reason I spent the night before the birthday compiling a DVD of our favourite Linus photos of the year. My extremely useful husband provided a nifty piece of software called Photo Story, and I spent the next three hours choosing, ordering, and tweaking the photos. I then added some lovely songs (they bring tears to my eyes!), and finally wrote the output (with my fingers crossed) to DVD. And to my great surprise (and relief!) it worked!
I had hoped to play the DVD as a background to the party, and I was delighted with how well it worked. Family members of course couldn’t get enough of it (Gaga seemed particularly keen to press Play again each time the DVD ended), and other guests enjoyed seeing the photos for the first time and wondering how they could create something similar for their own babies.
(You can download the DVD material if you want to, but it’s a whopping 36MB, so you probably don’t!)
Special Gift
Linus managed to get a special present from his cousin/adopted sister Nala late yesterday. After being very tolerant for 10 or 20 seconds, she decided to let Linus know that enough was enough and gave him a bash on each side of the head.
We thought that, as has happened once or twice before, her “swipes” had been slaps, i.e. warning shots with no claws out. But not so… Linus has a little claw mark on one temple… and FIVE claw marks spread across the other! He didn’t cry much, which probably means he hasn’t learnt his lesson.
Cake Time
My lovely friend RH offered to make the birthday cake for Linus. Unfortunately about 20 minutes into a quick visit to her on Saturday morning, I realised that she thought the party was on Sunday. Needless to say her grand plans didn’t come to fruition, and she had to dash to the supermarket for an emergency cake. (The cake ceremony worked just as well with a supermarket cake.)
There were probably more cameras than eyes looking at the event. The highlight was when Linus decided on a brand new move – stretching both hands in the air above his head, grinning, and making a strange noise like he’s straining (I can’t think of a poetic way to describe it I’m afraid!). My friend NM copied him and egged him on, and he kept doing it again and again and getting more and more excited, so Mummy and Daddy copied him and the crowd went wild!
And Finally, The Pressies
Crikey. What a lot of pressies Linus got. Being Mummy, I was on kitchen duty during a lot of the present-opening time, so I’m sad to say I don’t even know whom many of the presents were from. The list is long, and I can’t record them all here, but it includes (in no particular order!):
- a wooden handle with five jingle bells on it
- a little wooden car
- a harmonica (from Mummy)
- a cardboard book of animals
- two surfer dude singlets
- a fold-out table with numbers and alphabet pictures on it
- a HUGE cardboard “first 50 words” book
- a foam jigsaw alphabet floor mat
- a music set (castanets, maracas, a drum, cymbals, a three-note trumpet, and probably some other things I haven’t found yet)
- butterfly castanets (two from Daddy, one from Nana)
- a toy saxophone that plays tunes and lights up
- a wind-up wooden ladybird
- a child’s chair
- a Jacob’s ladder toy
- about three different sets of bath toys, including one that is battery operated and supposedly squirts water into the air (haven’t tried it yet)
What a lucky boy!
In fact, he got so much that the following morning I had to pack some old toys and new toys away. Some were too young for him, some too old for him, and some too nice to take out of their boxes just yet 
This routine isn’t really new, but more a formalisation of what we already do (or should do) with him. In particular, I want to make sure Linus is getting three good meals every day, plus snacks – with me still breastfeeding, it’s quite easy to be a bit slap-dash in that department!
