Our last lock down birthday of the year and hopefully the last lock down birthday full stop.
Wednesday was spent almost entirely doing birthday preparations, I think Jack had forgotten what I looked like by the end of the day. He did meet a friend for a long walk around the country park and came back a lovely shade of tomato (oopsie!). We had the family quiz in the evening and this week it was Amy’s turn. She decided to give herself the ambitious task of creating a version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ which meant creating a VERY long power point presentation.
The order we went in was determined by her version of ‘Fastest finger first’ which involved getting the closest answer to a very difficult question, although we all had a chance to win a million. Can confirm that none of us walked away with a million, scrap that, we didn’t walk away with anything – apparently Amy didn’t have the funds.
As I’ve said previously the theme of Jack’s birthday this year was Harry Potter (his absolute favourite!). We stayed up late decorating the kitchen with our extensive bought and homemade decorations including ‘floating’ candles, floating letters, ‘have you seen this wizard?’ signs which I badly photoshopped our faces on to and Hogwarts balloons. I also spread out an array of themed snacks including dragon eyes (olives), huffle puffs (wotsits), phoenix wings (chilli heat wave Doritos) and magic wands (strawberry laces!). I also baked some ‘sorting hat cupcakes’ which once bit into determined which house you were in by the colour of M&M.
I had gone extremely extra with the wrapping and wrapped them all in brown paper and stuck on harry potter themed postal stamps and labels – I took the theme and rolled with it. He had some lovely presents including a hamper full of extremely spicy sauces/jams/salts from Amy for him to add to the not very spicy food we cook.
Jack’s birthday cake was designed like the cake Hagrid makes for Harry in the first film, with squished bum mark and all. We appreciated the simplicity of the design when we were all knackered on Wednesday evening. It was a banoffee cake on Jack’s request.
Activities during the day included ‘pin the scar on Harry’, a mega Harry Potter Quiz (Jack got 56 and Amy got 56 and a half!) and a picnic by the river. We got take out dinner from ‘Bread and Pullet’ which is a British Tapas restaurant and I will go as far as saying this was my favourite lock down meal yet. Onion Bhaji scotch eggs, halloumi fries, truffle chips, garlic chicken kiev… and for pudding we ordered a banoffee sponge and two banana brownies which we shared. It was all incredible and all GF apart from the banoffee sponge!
The evening entertainment was Quidditch Beer Pong. Mum made some Quidditch hoops which we had to shoot the ping pong balls through. We had to delve to the deep dark depths of the alcohol cupboard to fill all the cups and jack found an ancient bottle of Ouzo (40%) much to our disgust. Amy and I were considerably worse than Jack and Mum which meant we got considerably more drunk. This then led on to the house party classic ‘ring of fire’ – something I never thought I’d play with my mum. Mum was the best question master and managed to get Amy out every time.
The evening ended by us finding an old disco light that we’ve had for over 10 years and getting Alexa to play ’00’s party’ and as Jack described it had a particularly ‘post wedding reception vibe’. A day we won’t forget.
