Paaaartay Time!

(Last updated on 14 September, but as usual posted late because of VPN issues…)

Last Sunday morning, Rosabelle woke up early enough – maybe she knew and was excited that we were going to her favourite Mai Dou Ge Ge’s 3rd birthday party. His mother had messaged me on Friday night to say that it was going to be an outdoor affair at Chaoyang Park. I was very excited as it would have been fun seeing the kids play around outdoors – but I got another message on Saturday night saying that weather forecasts predicted terribly hot weather this morning, so darn, they were going to have the party indoors, at their house. Just great. How terribly exciting. We always go there like at least once a week. But never mind that, I was actually quite glad for her call on this as it was really quite sunny today.

After her breakfast, we played awhile more at home before reaching their place slightly after 10:30am, bearing a toy gift (some gadget with shapes/holes) in hand as Rosabelle helped me lug the heavy toy upstairs. We were early and there was only one other guest around, as Mai Dou gave Rosabelle many party favors and toys. As usual, our girl made herself at home as she started playing, and enjoying a yogurt snack as well.
When the rest of the kids gradually came, there were altogether about 3 other invited families, and Mai Dou’s mum brought out a long piece of paper for the kids to doodle and scatter/glue confetti on. Rosabelle nicely participated, despite being the youngest, and left her mark on the greetings for the birthday boy, heh!
It’s been awhile since we’ve seen Wei Wei Jie Jie, who was back in her hometown for a few months.
Actually, Rosabelle wasn’t exactly the youngest there – the younger brother of one of the guests, Qi Qi, was also there – all 7 months, and seemingly 70kg, of him, haha! It wasn’t too long ago that we attended his 100-day celebration, and look how massive he has grown… just love this shot of him sneering curiously sideways at the balloon.
Not long later, as one of the adults stopped him from chomping on the balloon, he got angry, and even more fretful when they made him don a party hat. So. very. cute. (And cruel of me to continue snapping away as I laughed…)
Next came cake-time as Mai Dou had a lovely cake from 21cake.com, and all the kids gathered round and eyed the cake very greedily as they sang the birthday song and blew the candle. The older kids immediately lurched for the white chocolate signage on the cake, whilst Rosabelle looked on – maybe she did not realize it was edible (or nice), as I’ve never offered that to her before, haha…
There she is, practising for her own birthday cake routine next month, heh!
We enjoyed the cake (yes, I did too – I love chocolate…) and later, they served small sausages, prawns, and bacon. Now, I’ve never let Rosabelle eat sausages nor bacon before because they are very salty, have a lot of preservatives, and are basically considered junk food on my list. But since it was a happy occasion, and I was feeling magnanimous and the rest of the kids were also chomping on them, I let her try the sausages and she ate like 5 of them! I did not give her the bacon as it was oily and fat-streaky, but did not offer her anymore sausages as it was really enough sodium for the day (or week!).

The kids then started playing around awhile more in the house as we prepared to head outdoors.
This flying disc balloon was brought downstairs and became a major source of contention between all the kids, Rosabelle included, as she tried helplessly to tug at it. In the end, the adults had to step in and take it away, letting the kids take turns at it. As you can imagine, there were quite a lot of tears shed, but Rosabelle seems to remember what I’ve been trying to tell her about not fighting with older kids – she wandered around on her own, climbing the benches, looking for cats, picking up leaves.
Later, when she saw that the disc was lying there untouched, she quickly ran up to it and looked at me with a gleeful smile, as if asking me for permission to finally play with it as she was not snatching it from anybody. What a good girl! However, along came an older girl who took it away from her, and luckily her mum intervened and our girl had her turn at it without much hassle, undisturbed, heh…
After that, we just hung out abit more with each other till it was time to go home. My experience with past parties was that I would have a hard time (and feel quite bad about) restraining Rosabelle from eating too much party food or the lunch the hosts had kindly prepared, as we had already cooked lunch for her at home. Thinking it would be the same case this time round, I actually left word with Nainai to not cook our lunch today, but we only had cake and the junk food, so Nainai hastily put together a simple late lunch of noodles in vegetable/tomato/minced pork soup, which our girl happily finished all up when we reached home. Nice! At least the junk food she had earlier did not take up too much space for a proper meal.