esther and kezia went to a fancy party yesteday which involved creating lots of chocolate confectionary.

how cool is that !

kezia's party was at our house and kezia had a great time. here is jane, looking a bit like she's having a breakdown.

but actually, she'd leading a game of 'simon says'

kezia had her 4th birthday party yesterday. here's the usual party food

cakes made by the party guests

and of course the birthday cake itself (made by jane)

two donkeys (this reminded me of a Jimbus picture, although it's one photo not two.

who moved the tails ?

esther turned 6 on saturday and had her party yesterday. fantastically the miserable weather of the last few weeks had turned in to beautiful sunshine so they could have the party tea outside.

quite lukcy if you've got 19 kids at the party !

more parachute games today.

i'm under there somewhere.

this is the modern version of 'pin the tale on the donk'. it was very suspicious that the birthday boy scored a direct hit on the target ...

kids love slap stick comedy. i usually find this sort of antic anoying, but this chap was very excellent.

and it was great watching the kids concentrating on his show, and watch them watching him telling jokes that the grown ups had heard thousands of times before.

but for the kids it was the first time they'd heard them and they reacted accordingly

cake built by jane:

and extinguished by esther:

many party games involve music. and the choice of music is very important at a party. we got the party going with Lou Reed's Transformer. once the masses arrived i upped the funk with Supa Funky Vol 1

for the games we had a Boney M compilation. the kids loved it. and so did we.

pin the tail on the donkey is a classic game. this year we decided against hammer and nails, and used blu-tack to stick the tail on. esther managed to stick the tail on our coat rack rather than the donkey, which was quite impressive as it's on a different wall.

our friends tony and tanya helped at the party along with jane's mum so there was a good ratio of kids to growned-ups. tony agreed to be the official moving images archivist. i remained still-image archivist and as far as possible maintained artistic control over the proceedings.

tony wasn't that bothered about our furniture as can be seen here (he's standing on the arm of a chair). it turned out he wasn't too bothered about the carpet either as later he chucked a cup of tea on it.

we've yet to see if his footage was any good so i don't know whether to thank him yet or not.

UPDATE: we watched it and it was quite amazing. especially the top of the pops 360 degrees rotation bits during the musical games.

cake decorating was another activity at the party which everyone enjoyed. some of the designs were amazing:

(click cakes for bigger version)

esther is now at the age where the game twister is of interest. so is tony. he played it lots, even on his own with me doing the spinning.

i wasn't particulary comfortable with this arrangement. and neither was he. especially when his daughter jumped on his back.

(notice kezia going against the tide on the picture on the right. she's wearing a red t-shirt and shorts)

t-shirt painting was a party activity, supervised by jane's mum.

honor went for it with bright colours:

catherine decided on an elephant print which she named Cat:

After painting they were hung up and left to dry in our garage:

part of the party fun was searching for monsters. they were hidden all over the place. this one looked particularly good.