Belated happy 7th birthday to Izzy!

Another year passes and our little Izzy is 7, finally. It always feels like Abi's birthday comes around very quickly while we crawl toward Izzy's like a snail. Having said that April has been and gone in an instant so maybe it's a good thing.
As ever we struggle to decide what either of the girls want for their birthday. Once we've discounted the obvious - a pony or a baby brother - then we are into the more obscure. This year when asked there was definitely still a medical theme and so I spent an evening buying real stethoscope, boxes of 100 surgical gloves (white not blue) and a medic suit (age 5-7 and still too big!). Add to this some money (already spent on 2 new baby dolls, one for each of them courtesy of Izzy's generosity) and she was a happy little girl.

After a lot of discussion about parties we settled on a pony party - a couple of hours with picnic tea at the stables. I had the unenviable task of picking 6 very excited little girls up from school in one car. For anyone who has ever collected children from school on a Friday, they come laden with school bags, PE kit, various other end of week stuff. Add to this their clothes for the party and it was quite a lot of fit into the car, let alone man handle to it!

The party went down a treat. All the girls had a lovely time, no tears (apart from Izzy when she didn't get her chosen seat first off in the car) and certainly none of the stress normally related to throwing a kids party. My only concern was that Ruth has no sense of time and despite the party supposedly finishing at 6.30 we were still going strong at 7.15! Fine for us but I did feel for the parents who were picking up and hadn't thought to bring a jumper after the sun went down!

So after this back to normal. Girls are back in school, possibly for the last term as we have been considering a change of school. We've not been happy for a while and so decided to precipitate a conversation by putting in our notice, something you're are somewhat forced to do as you have to give a terms notice. Expecting to get a 'we are very sorry, please come in and discuss with us' we were a bit taken aback to get a 'thank you and best of luck'! So much for customer service! Given one of our bugbears has been poor communication this was the final nail for us. Their reason when asked was that it was down to the admin staff not informing anyone but feels like a poor excuse to us. Anyway, girls have a taster day on Friday at Thorngrove which is. Little co-ed independent school within walking distance in Woolton Hill. We'll see how they feel after that.

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