Tea and cakes

This week Dinosaur-Boy will be 4 years old. I am quite unsure how the time has passed so quickly, but somehow it has, and after the last two years of saying that he only wants family at his birthday parties, this year he has finally started smiling at the idea of a small gathering of friends in his birthday honour, and so on Thursday morning we will be having seven of his lovely friends to join us for party games and cake.

Today I started baking in preparation - first these tiny little cupcakes, such fun to mix up colour-coordinated icing and top off with a matching sugary jelly tot. Then I moved onto larger cup cakes, this time in pastelly shades...before I started wondering if boys will be agreeable to eating pink cupcakes. There will be a lot left for the one little girl that he has invited, if they don't. Despite the four years that we have spent together I still don't feel that I have attuned myself to boyishness yet. Dinosaur-boy fits in so easily, that he has never pushed me to do so - but I am thinking that reading this book (Raising Boys: Why Boys are Different - and What We Can Do to Help Them Become Healthy and Well-Balanced Men...nothing like a concise title!) could give me some reasons that I might not yet have thought of. What do you think about this - do you make any concerted efforts to nurture the 'boy' in your sons?

I am happy with the way that my cakes look, less so with the way they might taste....I am finding my new oven to be a challenge - my cakes feel hard and rock-like than, even though the colour is fine. Cooking with gas felt so much more intuitive to me. My lovely mother came and visited today and helped to entertain an ailing Zebra-girl who was weary with a head full of aches. In return I baked her a birthday cake to take round to her friend's house this evening: it seemed a poor trade-off and I implored her to stop off at Marks & Spencers on her way home to buy a replacement as I am sure it will be dense and that her poor friend will be reduced to having to put on some music to muffle the loud crunching noises as they eat it.

Cake trouble aside, there was a wonderful highlight to my day - the postman came bearing gifts from the lovely and very generous Ali! What a happy surprise - after my post about herb teas she had thought to send me some of this wonderful Pukka Revitalise Tea with Cinnamon, Cardamon & Ginger - you can only imagine the deliciously warm smell as I took it out from its cellophane. So this evening, enjoying the extra daylight, I sat and enjoyed a cup, and it is quite the most lovely thing - a cross between my favourite Licorice Tea and a spiced muffin (if such a thing could be drunk, rather than gobbled)....perfect. What kindness.

Also in the post was this postcard from my sister, Laura. I love it - there's something so perfect about a teacup (I am still meaning to do a whole post on my own teacup collection....so little time, so many random thoughts floating around in one's head) and this postcard so appeals to me, for I love any opportunity to play the 'which is your favourite?' game...it is a very small selection of the vast array that I have managed to photograph here!