10 minus 1

My little girl is no longer very little anymore. She celebrated her 9th birthday 2 days ago. One year short of being a decade old. haha As usual, we had a simple celebration at home. We have a (slightly) bigger group this time because Yeh Yeh and Mah Mah are here. Food was all bought except fried noodles. We had Subway sandwiches, Kenny Rogers roasters, cocktail sausages and satay. 7 adults and 3 kids couldn't finish all these food.

food to feed an army? :D

Subway platter - bought 3 foot-long, free 1 foot-long

After the kids have finished their meal, they played Wii games. I didn’t prepare any special activities for them, so what else is there for them to do? I didn't pump any balloons so no decorations and no balloons to play with. At least they won’t run around and make too much noise. :-)

XY chose pandan layer cake with dessicated coconut

sing-song session

After eating the cake, XY opened her presents. We bought an ambulance Lego set for her, which she chose herself. CH and family gave her a tutu while Yeh Yeh and Mah Mah gave her an angpow. Po Po and Zi Mai Po also gave her angpows which I took back from Penang in June. She even got a present (stickers and stationeries) from her piano teacher when she came for lesson yesterday. So sweet and thoughtful of her.

big princess and little princess

The Celebrations

This is another very backdated post. As mentioned earlier, we had a small party at home for CE’s birthday. I was really lazy to make balloon decorations. I told ah boy and he was okay with it (wah, so considerate hahaha). Then while he was napping, I felt bad so I pumped a few balloons and hung them on the curtain rail.

super simple deco

We had our usual “party food”. Bought satay, ordered pizza and Kakak fried bihun and nuggets (just a bit for the kids) and cooked curry chicken. After the kids finished their food, they played Wii games, as requested by the birthday boy (coz usually no pc/tv games on school days).


jie jie, didi, kor kor and mei mei

blueberry cake

presents



For the celebration in school, I bought a black forest cake for him and prepared party packs for his classmates. I planned to make the paper bags myself by referring to Sasha’s post. Thanks for the tutorial, girl! After buying the brown papers, I found it so tedious to cut the papers into the right size, fold, stick, fold, stick, fold some more and open it up. And I had to prepare 24 of them (including for jie jie and his cousins)! I wanted to give up so I went hunting for those ready-made paper/plastic bags. But can’t find any suitable/nice ones. There aren’t many choices around my area. The patterns are very girlish, not that suitable for his class where majority are boys. So I had no choice but to make the paper bags myself. Luckily I bought a steel ruler and a penknife (really sharp!) so it made the work a little easier. I cannot imagine the amount of work needed if I were to do exactly like Sasha. Cut out the alphabets to make the kids’ names? Oh, forget it. So I just printed some characters (decided by birthday boy) as decoration. I also eliminated the strings and just folded them over. Jie jie helped me a lot with making the paper bags and sticking the cartoons. The birthday boy wrote the names of his friends on the paper bags and put the goodies into them.

contents in party pack

party packs for friends

I also prepared some gifts (chocolates and sweets) for the teachers as they were celebrating Teacher’s Day on the same day as well. Got this idea from mom2ashley’s post. Thank you, D! Found some white plastic bags in the drawers, printed some wordings on coloured paper and cut out rectangular shapes from manila cardboard. Again, I got CE to write the names of the teachers himself.

gifts for teachers