the adlards

Phil and Mel did a fantastic job setting up Ben & Anna’s princess and pirates party. That’s Ben & Anna in Oxfordshire, not NC. We had planned to spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday (day of the party) with them, but having left on Sunday and got one junction down the M40 we decided to turn around and spend another night visiting. Lucky them …

I think they had about a thousand people through their house on Saturday and Sunday. You could tell it had been that many by the number of magnolia petals trampled into the new carpets. We met or re-met lots of friends – people we’d been at school, or bits of school, or university with – and at least five families stayed over on Saturday night, giving us ample opportunity to eat and drink and chat.

The party on Sunday was an object lesson in how to entertain more-very-small-kids-than-one-person-can-count-unless-they’re-sleeping. Josie loved it, having got over any shyness on the Saturday, and led the charge in the treasure hunt, helped Anna blow out the candle on her cake, and helped Phil open presents (for which he was, of course, very grateful).

In the afternoon (following our turnaround) we got to spend some time catching up with Phil and Mel and seeing the school – including a very nice climbing wall which could see us visiting far more often … Josie and Ben did some climbing on Sunday. They played beautifully together on Sunday and Monday; both were quite upset when we left the first time on Sunday. It went better today because they’ve made arrangements to visit each other in the holidays.

We’ve had a great weekend. I ate a lot of Saffershire Rusks, which I can’t recommend highly enough.

Pics in the gallery.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 8:24 pm by james and is filed under Family, Friends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.