5 Today

Today, Anja, our dear daughter turned five years. Happy birthday sweetheart, love from Mummy and Daddy. This post is obviously post fact but I think she had a good day. We’ll have a small party on Saturday but today we celebrated within the family. This morning she opened cards from both sets of grandparents, us and her siblings of course in addition to a card from Brooke and her parents. She received a few small presents, couple of DVDs, an umbrella and a scooter all of which, in typical Anja fashion she graciously received. She had a call from her Gran this morning, another from “uncle Håkan from Sweden" later this evening and generally had a good day at school, she told everybody that she was five.

This evening, as a special treat and in order to mark this occasion, Brooke graciously agreed to stay later to babysit while Lynne and I took her to a “fancy restaurant”, since she was so grown up. This obviously upset Isabel a little but her day will come. We went to a local white tablecloth French style restaurant, Bistro 501. She got all dolled up in a frilly pink dress, like she can, and off we went. She loved it. She tried escargot (snails) and baked brie, she had a small soup and a shank of lamb (I’ll eat most of that for lunch tomorrow). The dessert was on the house, a chocolate and cream mousse. She had coke for the first time in her life. She declared at the end of the meal that this was the “best day of her life”, my heart melted. All of this was a treasure but most memorable for me was the fact that upon receiving a small sweet from the waitress on our way out, she insisted on taking one home for her sister , “Isabel would like that Daddy”.