First Birthday? Done.

Yes, as mad as it sounds, Jack is already a year old.

I know that it was only a matter of time, but the time has flown by. Already, we’re packing him up for university, as that’ll be here soon.

Jack had lots of new toys to add to his growing heap of brightly coloured plastic in his playroom. So much so, that Toys ‘R Us are getting twitchy.

It seems that most of the toys for kiddies these days all require batteries, are filled with lights and make random noises in the night! I don’t remember that far back, obviously, but I don’t remember having toys like that. A better comparison, maybe, would be that I don’t remember younger cousins or family friends’ babies having such toys – instead, they were more Action Man-esque, in that they were figures or toys that you played with. Hmm, but maybe then I’m thinking of toys for older children.

Anyway, Jack had a small family gathering on the weekend following his birthday, where I cooked the most of the meal… on the barbeque. Outside in the cold. In February. Claire’s folks, my folks and my sister came to which the little sprog a happy birthday, making Jack the centre of attention yet again - something that he’s getting to enjoy. He seems like pulling their strings by getting them to clap after he has – something he even managed to do the other day in Church for a Christening with the other attendees. (He claps. They clap. He laughs. They laugh. The Vicar notices. I laugh.)

As with Christmas, he didn’t really get the point of it all. We tried half-opening presents and encouraging him to rip the paper open, which almost goes against everything that we’re teaching him, such as how he handles books and not to rip pages, etc. And then we give him brightly coloured boxes and show how to do it. Madness.

He didn’t really get the whole ‘singing happy birthday in the presence of a cake and then blowing out a fire single-handed’. Just to make sure he knew what we were doing, (and to get the most out of the ‘1’ candle) Claire and I re-lit it, and made everyone sing again. Again, he looked bemused, but it made us all laugh when he joined in the clapping at the end. We were all clapping that it was his birthday; he was clapping that we’d all finally finished singing!

One thing we tried, being that it was a party for a child, was to make the jelly component of jelly-and-ice-cream. The only problem, was that we didn’t have any jelly moulds and tried at several places in town to get some. I had a brilliant idea of using ice-cube trays and filling lots of them with different flavoured jelly and then serving them up together, by popping them out of the mould. Simple.

Well - Here’s a tip for you:

“Don’t try to use ice-cube trays as jelly moulds. It doesn’t work like that.”
– Brett Rigby, 2010

We found this out the hard way.

After making six different flavour mixes of jelly, and chilling each of them to set in the trays, serving them (whole and intact) wasn’t easy and ended up scooping them out with a tea-spoon. The result wasn’t bad, as we made the best of a bad situation, it just was not the ideal-world scenario that I had envisaged. I think everyone liked it though, even my sister Emma who “doesn’t like Orange jelly”. :o)

All in all, I think he really enjoyed himself. We did.