Things I am a bit ashamed of:

This cake:

To be fair, and in my defence, I had “help”. The cake was supposed to be a VERY CLEVER dinosaur cake, for Casper’s 3rd birthday yesterday. I had very grand plans for it, but the children all woke up on Tuesday in pools of vomit, and so couldn’t go to school, and so my cake making day was besieged by three keen, yet entirely unskilled, chubby-fingered, sugar-hungry, dirty-fingernailed children. And at some point, I just surrendered to the horrible colours and the lumps of misshapen royal icing (which were supposed to be dinosaurs, apparently) and the bits of picked-off cupcake all over the floor and the split icing which oozed with waxy butter and the sticky jam that ended up being eaten from the jar with a spoon under the cloak of the dining room table. It was all really unfortunate. And, after all that, here is the only evidence that anyone was tempted to eat it:

Not the cake, mind, but the weeping orange pterodactyl made of food colouring and sugar. The cake has since been shaved, the green scraped off, the cupcakes dumped, and tonight I covered it all up again with chocolate icing. Yesterday’s revolting cake becomes tomorrow’s school cake sale offering. You can’t call me wasteful.

And yes, I think Casper is holding a packet of matches. Ahem.

More on the birthday:

Casper wore a dinosaur polyester sweaty suit. He lost the headpiece quite early on, which velcroed under the chin, giving him a very tight hat with a tail-bit that was covered in spikes. He also had green polyester dinosaur shoes, but was wearing them under the Scooby Doo boots. Now THIS is a good look on the day of your third birthday. Comfort, as always, is overrated:

The Baby. After the party food, just before he grabbed my legs, and vomited all over my boots:

Casper was given a crocodile hand puppet for his birthday. It disappeared in our communal garden. I thought it would be in the shrubs. It wasn’t, so then I thought one of the privileged little kids who share the garden and who are largely cleaner, better-behaved, and therefore sneakier than my children had STOLEN IT. I made a poster, a plaintive, begging poster that I stuck on the swings to SHAME the thieving children and their complicit parents into giving us back the crocodile, and I took Casper and Ned into the garden to call loudly for the crocodile to come back, throughout the day. Here is the poster:

(It used to read “Taken from the garden 23 March” but I felt, at the last minute, that ‘taken’ was a mite accusatory, so coloured in the words and turned them into a black birthday cake, and replaced it with the gentler ‘gone‘). It was a mournful vigil. I was very cross with the thieves. I spoke to the gardener about the theft. She popped in tonight and handed me both the crocodile and the poster. It was in the shrubs. European Innocent Non-Thieving Children Of The Communal Garden – I apologise.

Aaaand the baby broke into my handbag and stole my last Tom Ford lipstick and stuck his finger into the tube and mushed it and ate quite a bit of it.

That is the third Ford lipstick the children have somehow mangled. There must be a lesson in this for me, somewhere.