29 again.

There's been a planning error: my birthday is scheduled for a Monday this year. Frankly, I'm not quite sure how the schedulers thought we were going to manage any celebrating at all, what with the kids and Fixit being off at school/work all day, and then the after-school tennis and me teaching 2 classes in the evening. I mean, I'm sure it won't be all drear. I assume the boys have taken my subtle [x] shopping days left till my birthday! hints so I can expect a present. And I always tell my tap students that they have to dance extra well on my birthday, and by & large they are very obliging about this. And let's not forget lovely Nell, who is on holiday and taking me to lunch. But if I wanted to have a birthday dinner with my three favourite males, then what we needed to do was to bypass the schedule and bring my birthday dinner forward by one day.

Which is the long way of saying that tonight (Sunday) the four of us went to a nice Vietnamese restaurant for garlic prawns and wonton noodle soup and spring rolls and rice paper rolls and in Cherub's case a bowl of steamed rice. (Don't worry I also made him have a smidgen of broccoli, he foolishly left this right to the end in the hope he'd wriggle out of having to eat it and then had no lemonade to wash it down with: live and learn Cherub, live and learn.)

And then we went to the icecream shop for dessert. And if you are thinking that no-one would want icecream on a freezing cold rainy night, you would be wrong. But we were pretty cold by the time we got into the car.



Home and in my pyjama pants by 7.30pm! Now that's a good night out. I think I'm pretty well set up for a nice birthday now.