I’ve just had a call from my brother to say that my mum has had a serious accident and has been rushed into hospital. She fell from the attic through the stairwell and landed on her back near the bottom of the stairs. I’m sick with worry as we don’t yet know how badly injured she is. I’ll be away from the blog for a day or so while I go down to visit tomorrow. Please keep your collective fingers crossed for my wonderful mum and bear with me as I won’t be replying to emails for a short while.

Just thought I’d show you a picture of some of the things Amy made at the sleepover:

On the top row are the shrinkles – sheets of plastic that you draw on, colour in, cut out
and bake so that they shrink down to about a seventh of their original
size. We had some pre-printed flower fairy sheets and some plain sheets that the girls used to design their own fairies (my favourites). Below are the Bindeez – little plastic beads that you lay out on a tray and spray with water to make them stick together. Amy made a pig and a girl to her own design. Being plastic neither are particularly eco-friendly but they are great fun and quite magical to 8 year olds!

The girls and I had great fun on saturday night / sunday morning. We had take-away pizza and ice-cream sundaes with all the trimmings, put on make-up, sang and danced along to high school musical, did some crafts (bindeez and shrinkles), they had a posh bath with bath fizzers and it was topped off with scarey stories and a lot of giggles very late into the night (I think I fell asleep at 12.30 and they were still whispering and giggling!). I thought they’d have a lie-in but there they were, bright as buttons at quarter to 7 in the morning. After a full english breakfast they dressed up and played the morning away and then at lunchtime the party sleepover was over. Needless to say we had a quiet afternoon and an early night yesterday.

I’m really glad that Amy enjoyed it so much but it will be a while before we do it again – it’s definitely the kind of thing that you need to psyche yourself up for and have a couple of quiet days for recovery on the otherside! Thank goodness for monday mornings and knitting!