Happy Birthday Annalise

Yay! 4 today! We love you very very much our little beautiful pumpkin pie!
(We celebrated her birthday yesterday as we had to go to another little boy's party today) but we had a lovely day yesterday and she was thoroughly spoilt!

Valentines Day & Birthday Celebration
We woke up early to open her presents - she wanted a Princess Rapunzel Barbie and the Prince as well, and then we also bought her a pink vanity dressing table as she is obsessed with makeup!
Andrew had to go into work as there was a student council/community service function he was running so I took the girls to the swimming pool for the morning and we played and played and played in the pool for about 2 hours. Annalise & Juliette love to act out all the fairy tales in the water (Red Riding Hood and Gingerbread man and 3 little pigs and Princess stories etc with all the songs) and so I have to act like the big bad wolf or the fairy godmothers etc and they act out all the nice parts, whilst we run and float and swim in the water!

After that, we went to visit Andrew at the gym where this kids were selling pizza and drinks to all the basketball players (there was a huge inter school tournament on at NJIS) and then all three of us went back home to watch a Barbie movie and all fell asleep for an hour until Andrew came home!!

Grandad rang Annalise up to wish her Happy Birthday and then we took the girls to the Mall to Jungle Safari for a play whilst Andrew and I went to an Italian cafe/Bar for a glass of wine to celebrate Valentines day and then we all went home for an earlyish night (11pm) as we had to be up at 4.30am to go to a cross country run down south.

A lovely day. Annalise went everywhere with her new Barbies. In fact, she hasn't let them go today either!

The Run
We managed to get up at 4.30am although we were all pretty tired!
We caught the school bus at 5ish along with friends from school, and made it to the venue by 6.15am. Far too early to be running!
I went first, running in the 5km race (I know I'm fitter than last time, but I still get to the 3km marker and have to stop running and do the scout's pace running walking thing. It's frustrating as I'm doing really well and then it all just goes downhill from there onwards! Mind you, I got a real burst of energy at the 4km marker and managed to run most of the way to the finishing line without feeling like I was going to pass out this time! The hills were killers though - 5kms wouldn't be too bad if it was all on flat ground!
My time was still slow though - 35 minutes. The better runners in our school staff team did it in times ranging from 21 to 25 minutes. So I am terribly slow in comparison!

After my race, the girls were in the 100m dash. Both of them are great runners and came 2nd place in their races (soooooo proud!) and then Andrew pushed them in the pram and I walked around the 2.5km fun run race with them. The courses went via some really beautiful resevoirs and rice paddies, but the ground was pretty rough and hard to push the double pram over all the holes and bumps and hills.

It was all over by 8am.

Then we went to the Ritz Carlton Hotel for the breakfast buffet and runined all our good work!

The Party
We were home by lunchtime and all had an afternoon nap, and then at 3pm we had to go to our friend Ian's 3rd birthday party.
It was fun, although we were all forced to watch a performance by four precocious (and very ugly as Andrew says) home-schooled Indonesian children who have now managed to destroy Van Morrison songs evermore for me. They had obviously been trained by their father and mother who were smiling throughout, proud as punch, doing all the operatic gestures along with their children. The kids' voices were not too hot and they kept doing this horrendous forte tremolo thing with their voices which made us cringe in our seats.
They performed 3 songs.
We smiled politely through the first song, but by the third, it was hard to stop grimacing! Andrew's face would have made a wonderful picture!

We are now relaxing at home and are going to order Italian in for the night. Ahhhhh. Yummy.