Birthday party madness

Caelan's birthday party was yesterday and we had 15 toddlers here. It was chaos! But they all had a great time, Caelan had so much fun having all his friends here. We'd bought 100 balloons and had most of them on the trampoline - which was the star attraction. We also had the sandpit, plane swing, other swing, all of Caelan's bikes plus the bigger toys we hired - a sit on digger, two kid spinning ride, rocking 3 kid alligator and slide. There certainly wasn't a lack of fun things to do. In our stressful rush leading up to it (lordy, lordy it sure was stressful!) we didn't get a lot of things done - we'd planned to have Caelan's double tent with adjoining tunnel set up outside but didn't, there was food we didn't do as well (though there certainly wasn't a shortage of food!!! The kids just weren't really interested in eating, it was all about playing) and one of the activities (decorating cookie pig faces to take home) didn't happen - perhaps we'll make them and put them into the already named bags and post them as a thank you. Chris and I are both still sick with a virus so felt horrible the whole day and my back and pelvis pain was just killing me. I swear if there wasn't people around, sometimes I would have been screaming or crying in pain! Due to us not feeling the best taking photos or video footage just didn't happen. Which is a real bummer, but never mind - we got a few but it would have been great to get some of all the kids playing and going crazy. We got a few of cake time and pressies though, so at least that's something.

The cake was a huge success though I've gotta say! We were sooooo happy with the end result - we thought the cat cake from last year would surely make any other cake we made a disappointment in our eyes. But no! We were so happy with this years too and he loved it. We were up till 2am doing the cake and blowing up balloons and other stuff we could do while Caelan slept. Then it was swimming first thing in the morning, luckily we were able to drop him off to Chris' parents after swimming so we had a couple of hours to do more of the preparations. He was dropped home after lunch and we had heaps to do while he slept... But he had a different story! He was not sleeping! He screamed for a while and then played for a bit in his room before deciding to scream again - we gave up and got him up at about 2pm. I was ready to cry/kill/run away/vomit/die at this stage and a 2 years olds birthday party with a million people was the LAST thing I wanted - but it wasn't about me.

He loved it so much that this morning he went running to the door shouting excitedly "Birthday party! Birthday party", he looked out over the deserted party-lands with all the toys and balloons and got sad. He looked up at me nearly crying and sobbed "People for my birthday party???..." and I told him that his birthday party was yesterday and it's finished now. He didn't like this and his voice cracked with the threat of a huge break-down "All the people come birthday party". Poor, funny little boy. Whenever the dogs have barked today he runs to the french doors exclaiming "Everybody's here! Everybody's here now!" looking at the gate. So he had a wonderful time and loved his birthday party.