Lettuce Turns ½

It seems like yesterday that I gave birth to the most beautiful boy on the planet but time flies by soooo quickly and suddenly I realised, he’s 6 months old. Noooooooooooooo!


When did that happen?  Even though Lettuce is my third child and I really should have got a handle on it by now, it still amazes me how quickly the time goes, how quickly the clothes shrink and how quickly my little bundle that used to just stare blankly upwards, has grown a little personality.  He rolls around the floor pushing up on his chubby arms, pretending to crawl, darts his head towards anything more exciting than his bottle (which is pretty much anything) and he has made nappy-changing a challenging new art-form.
   

Both Tomato and Bacon LOVE their baby brother to bits and shout “hello Bubby” whenever he’s been out of their sight for anything longer than 15 minutes.  The first thing they do when they get home from school is race to find Bubby, then Bacon pretends to sneeze on him and he squeals with delight and everyone laughs.  They both feed him as often as I’ll allow them and fight over whose bed he’s going to lie on during story-time, it really is very sweet.

When Tomato turned 6 months I was so excited and I couldn’t wait for her to turn a year so I threw her a half party.  The girls found out about this and informed me that they were planning a half party of their own for their little brother.  As thoughtful as this may sound, realistically my 3 and 5 year old are purely focused on the sweets and all activities surrounding getting the sweets for the party.  Me, on the other hand, I began thinking about all the work that a party (even half a party) involves, the shopping, the making, the cleaning etc especially with 2 little “helpers”, but they were having none of that.  Their well-laid plans were presented to me.  There were only going to be sweet treats, no savoury snacks like sausage rolls, which are apparently “yuck.”  So they chose fudge, ice-cream cups filled with fudge, Smarties, Astros and of course, THE CAKE.

I whipped up some of my infamously awesome fudge, which if I may say so myself, was A-W-E-S-O-M-E (you have to sing the word awesome to get the full feeling of the awesomeness).  Some of the fudge I was instructed to spoon into the ice-cream cups while it was still hot (so that the Astros would stick) and the rest was poured into a pan and later cut into blocks and then in half (of course).  I baked the cake and to everyone’s delight, took it out the oven and cut it diagonally in half in keeping with the theme.  The girls insisted on blue icing “because Bubby is a boy”.  I made a bowl of blue icing and the girls had one job and one job only – to stick the entire BIG box of Smarties onto the cake (ok bar the 50 that were consumed during the production process.  It goes without saying that each colour needed to be tasted by both of them to ensure Nestle’s quality is up to their usual standards and obviously the new blue ones needed extra investigation). 

  

At this point I would like to mention, in case any friends are reading this,  that only family are invited to half parties.  The reason being that often the saliva-to-icing ratio exceeds the average consumer’s RDA (recommended daily allowance).  Furthermore sticky Smarties are not really listed in the top 10 favourites of party goers.

Anyhoo, half cups of tea and coffee were served together with half cups of cool drinks for the girls.  The fudge was plated in a ration-styled manner to reduce overindulgence by the party-planners and the piece de resistance – the half cake was served.  Tomato stopped everyone in their tracks by shouting “wait we need a candle!!!” and ran off to find one.  I told her not to because Lettuce only gets a candle when he turns a full year but she insisted so I thought I’d let her have her moment, but she came back with a candle and plonked it in the middle of the cake.  She’d found a candle in the shape of a zero – how flippin cute and clever!!  

Tomato, very proud of her cake

We sang happy birthday to Lettuce and everyone had a wonderful time.  Afterwards I must admit I did feel a little green after eating a plethora of sweet things (and admittedly I was consuming more due to everything being in halves, psychologically it’s just not right to only have half, even the fudge that I rationed “for the children”) but I felt like sugar was oozing out of every pore of my body.  But the girls were in their element!  They were bouncing off the walls and they had so much fun.  

Half a cake

Now as exciting as this little half party was for the rest of us, the guest of honour could obviously not partake in the party food.  No, poor baby Lettuce who was promised to get his first taste of something more exciting than formula on this day, was presented with a meal a little blander than cake - 3 teaspoons of rice cereal; that was how he celebrated this milestone day.  No wonder he gagged, choked and spat it out indignantly! 

Lettuce's first mouthful

Happy half birthday my beautiful boy.









Legend - BLT refers to my children:
Bacon - 3½ years
Lettuce - ½ year
Tomato - 5½ years
Still confused? – see My First Blog Post