5th Birthday Beach Party

Today was our daughter's birthday party. Her actual birthday isn't until Monday but she seems to have a whole birthday weekend going for her - tomorrow we have various visits from relatives wanting to see the birthday girl as well so she will be constantly entertained!! :)

She changed her mind for breakfast this morning - she had said she wanted to have a smoothie, but decided to make the most of Liam - our chief pancake-cooker - being home to have pancakes! The others had theirs with lemon juice & sugar, but I decided to have mine with some stewed plums and lemon yoghurt...

2 of these completely filled me up - the fruit & the yoghurt made them way more filling than usual!!

Late morning, we took the butterfly birthday cakes, as well as various other party bits, down to my Mum's beach hut to set up for the party. Loads of our family helped today - thank you so much to everyone! :)

The weather wasn't as sunny as I would have liked - in fact it was really quite windy and chilly - but all the children still had fun playing in the sand and paddling in the sea which is the main thing!

There were lots of other children there (14 children and 15 adults in total I think!) but I'm reluctant to post photos of non-family members, so I've had to be really selective with the photos I use - difficult when most were group shots, so apologies if this post doesn't seem to give the full picture!!

As well as playing on the beach, we also had lunch (thanks to my sister's boyfriend who was in charge of the BBQ!)...

birthday cake...

and presents...

Izzy had such a lovely day, and I'm so glad that so many of her friends were able to make it despite it being in the school holidays, and so many of our family came down to help out! Quite a few parents thought we were very 'brave' to host a party on the beach, but all the children were so well behaved and we had enough adults to "allocate" them one child to watch each, so it all worked really well :)

Izzy was also completely spoiled with all the lovely presents she was given...

A big thanks to anyone who happens to be reading it, she loves all her gifts :) Lots of new things to play with, and it's not even her actual birthday yet...such a lucky girl!

Liam and I are absolutely exhausted this evening - as I'm sure the rest of our family must be - no matter how successful a party, it is still quite stressful! I spent most of the time counting heads to make sure we hadn't lost anybody!!!

Also, whilst I remember, would anybody like to write a guest post for me? I've never written or hosted a guest post before, so I'm not entirely sure how it works to be honest but I'm sure between us we can figure it out! We're going away for a few days at the end of the week, so it would be great if I had a couple of posts I could put up on the blog while I'm internet-less. Email me at porridgeandparsnips@live.co.uk if you're interested. Thank you :)