Two Girls
– How old are you?
– I’m doo!
Yes it’s been two years already. And the girls had their birthday party on their birthday last weekend.
It was an overcast, cold wintery day just like it was when they were born. We invited all of the girls’ special friends: Grandma and Grandpa; Heidi, their nanny; Godparents Di and Andy and a new friend for them since their last birthday – Helen, who goes with me and the girls to galleries on Tuesdays, who came with her partner Sam. Grandpa was overseas visiting cousin Oli, aunty Maggie and uncle Peter. Uncle Marcus wasn’t well enough to come this year. And we didn’t invite any children this time: none of the children they know are as close to them as the grownup people who dote on them almost as much as we do.
We had a perfect party, starting with a spread of their favourite food: corn fritters, guacamole with corn chips for dipping, sandwiches, frankfurters, fairy bread, twice-baked chocolate butterfly cakes (the second time was unintentional: I was storing them in the oven when it was pre-heated for the cake), a buttermilk vanilla cake decorated as a baby’s face to reflect the girls’ current obsession. There were also smarties and jelly babies in small bowls within their arms’ reach. The girls climbed up on to the table as is their custom and sat there for more than an hour like princesses surrounded by their subjects and their birthday picnic, which they munched through very contentedly while the adults admired them and ate too.
The food was good and it was nice to get a group of people together who all had the same interest – our girls – but the highlight was something we had been preparing Rhea and Lara for with story books featuring puppet shows for several months. Di decided more than six months ago that she would make a puppet show for Lara and Rhea and she (with some help from Andy for the wooden construction) had been sewing the puppets from scratch, sewing the puppet show curtains, painting the stage and decorating it with a repeated motif created with a stamp, not to mention writing the script complete with puns about Marcus’s dog Mozart and references to Rhea and Lara. She coopted mum in to playing four of the eight characters and to rehearsals at her place. It was a present of many tens of hours of creativity and work.
The girls sat on knees and watched intently in the dark room lit up with Andy’s bike light that spot-lit the stage. The adults were just as engaged.
– ‘Did you make the puppets Di?’, asked Heidi afterwards. ‘Did you make everything? Really?’
We’re having another performance in a few months – Steve and I can’t wait until their next birthday. Di said the script will evolve as the girls get older and they’ll end up groaning about ‘not another puppet show!’
I think they’ll love it for years to come.
