Birthday preparations and the day itself

It is Tim's birthday today so the past couple of days have been spent preparing for the day. I have the week off work so as well as baking, wrapping presents, playing with Alex, decorating the sitting room etc we have done a bit towards our great house organisation. We have cleared more of the garage and one end of the garage is now arranged so that the enormous roof-rack box can be stored in the garage and not the entryway which is wonderful. We can now actually get the pushchair into the house which makes going for walks much easier. We have also taken loads of things to Oxfam including a box which was packed up over two years ago!! I am feeling a lot happier about how things are looking downstairs.

Sadly Alex still isn't very well, his voice is incredibly croaky and his sleeping is eratic and he is constantly tired. This means that he has been a little more clingy than usual in patches. However, today he has been wonderful, tolerating being left to play on his own a lot more and has been eating better. His favourite things to do at the moment are to blow sloppy wet raspberries and crawl around on his tummy, mostly backwards. It is amazing the distance he can travel by rolling and 'swimming'. The nice thing is that he looks so pleased with himself when he does it. Alex has had fun crafting over the past few days. I can give him a felt pen and he will spend ages happily hitting the desk with it and dragging it over the paper. It is slightly hit and miss as to whether he draws on the paper, the desk, himself or me, but we have fun. This is one of his master pieces!

Despite Alex not being well I did manage to make and decorate a birthday cake for Tim. It was requested that I make a chocolate orange cake, which I have never made before so to the traditional cake mixture I added chocolate orange drinking powder and two Terrys chocolate orange bars (chopped up small). For the icing I melted Terrys chocolate orange, butter and added some more hot chocolate orange powder and milk before mixing in the icing sugar. The result was extremely yummy but very rich...you can't have very much of it in one go. Tim was very happy with it which was the main thing. I had fun decorating it with writing icing, hundreds and thousands, chocolate drops and chocolate buttons as the photo shows.

Tim has enjoyed his birthday and the run up to it, which we spent doing lots of present giving and receiving (I gave him some new computer games and a posh gaming keyboard, which he has spent ages playing with and configuring), eating nice food (smoked salmon, strawberries and cream, birthday cake, and a greek style buffet - one of Tim's favourites, take away curry), playing with Alex, watching superhero movies (Fantastic 4 and Spiderman3), going for a walk, and generally having nice chats. Sadly there is no picture of the birthday boy as he doesn't want me to put one on the web so here is one of Alex again!

I have done just a little crafting today, as the previous days were spent wrapping presents and cooking for Tim's birthday. These are two book marks I have started for Lotties swap on the CM&PC forum. These are just a trial run and I think the final version will have one of these designs on the front and the other on the back as they go quite well together. The background is made by stippling two inks onto the card (yellow and green) and then using a mixture of stamps from Crafty Individuals, Simple Expressions flora 5, Hero Arts and Wooden Stampers to layer up the images. The result is an autumnal feeling book mark which I am quite pleased with.

Tim has decided that instead of going out for the day tomorrow he wants to spend the day playing at home with his new presents, so I should be able to do some more crafting then. More soon,

Love,

Caro

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