Get this party started!

I know, it's less than a week to Rosabelle's birthday, and even lesser to her paartaay inviting her friends from the yard. Progress on the party stuff has been slow, and there really isn't a theme (as Wayne says, "the theme's 'birthday', right?") but we'll get down to buying the fruits, snacks and decoration (balloons et al) soon.

We have already invited most of the folks, gotten the goody bag items of rubber and wooden toys (need the bags and the tags though), and have placed an order for a Hello Kitty cake, and planning to get finger foods from Malacca Legend, a Malaysian restaurant, as well as designed the signages (as above) from the lift landing to our home and at the main door. There will be a photo wall at our kitchen glass area chronicling her 12 months of photos, and Chinese children's songs playing on the CD.

Over the past month, we've also developed more than 1,500 of her photos since Day 0 - gulp! - and these are in nice albums for the guests' viewing (if anyone is really that patient). We won't have any professional photo/videographer on the party day though, but I will be getting in touch with the folks from Box Photo, the ones who did a great job on Rachel's photos, to do a shoot around the end of this month to commemorate her coming of age.

Considering the age of the kids, there won't be much activities, other than the cake cutting, but we'll be arranging a 抓周 session, where she will pick out an object from a group of items (all never seen before). The first item she hangs onto and does not let go will represent her future career. We'd seen this at another kid's party a few months back, and it was quite fun for the guests. So, we're going to have to prepare quite a few things for our girl to grab at!

Her get-up on that day is courtesy of Marianne Cheh Cheh, a lovely white frock which the latter fittingly wore at our wedding in 2006 (since washed, of course), and I just tested to see if her short hair could hold a hairclip (yes it can! I've got a matching purple/pink rabbit clip for her to match the flowers on the dress). Being the anal-retentive me, I've already instructed Wayne that we also need to deck ourselves in white to match our daughter's dress.

Our girl has also been gearing up for D-Day - Wayne released his grip on the walker at night to find that she could actually manage 'walking' on her own, though she had problem gearing the walker in the right direction and would always slant it and bang into things. But it was fun watching her toddle along happily, and she even refused to stop, crying when Wayne carried her up for fear of her being too tired (she even perspired!).

Heh, looks like we are all on track for party day this Friday. Now, if only we can source for a good birthday present for our girl... (giving an angpow is too practical, right? It'll all just go into her endowment/education fund...).