Happ Birthday Lucy (a making of)

Yesterday was a huge and successful day for us. It was our friend's Birthday and we we wanted to do something a little bit special but since she is quite a 'low-key' person she didn't want to do anything too flamboyant for her Birthday. Mark suggested just coming over to mine to chill and eat pizza. That would be fine for some situations; but not this one.

Texts were sent, phone calls exchanged, messenger pigeons set free in order to arrange a surprise party! With Me, Dan, Jenny and Phoebe on our team here is what we did.

Firstly I got up and had a shower and some breakfast, can't do nothin' til you done that. Biked down into the high street to pick up a piñata plus munchables for the evening:

Penny the piñata

 I then met up with Jenny for some amazing cake baking, she had per-prepared some delicious fairy cakes but we also went all out to make an amazing sponge cake.

Initial stages of the cake decorating

 So, now we had a small buffet table with crisps, sweets and the like but the table looked a bit bare, as did the room. Before I even had a chance to think Jenny bursted out with 'Banner!' like an over excited child. Grabbed our roll of 14 year old paper and got cracking with paint at the ready.

Long way to go here, still had to colour in 'PY BIRTHDAY LUCY'!

So far so good. Picked up Dan from school and ventured to both Sainsburys and Tesco for decorations and additional bits

The car boot was groaning with goodies at this point

Back to mine (we were in a bit of a rush now.) Dan and Jenny decorated the cakes, and the room while I endeavored on a much more feral task involving these damned things:

 

 

As of yesterday I have a love/hate relationship with coconuts

Plan was to have hollowed out coconuts as quirky make-shift cups. Plan was to have them done nice and quick. Notice how it's daytime in this picture? Retrospectively I should have taken a photo of my little coconut shop of horrors with a tool-set ranging from a Chinese meat cleaver to a hack saw, just anything I could get my hands on to crack open these bastards. Immensely satisfying when it happened though, just took 90 minutes longer than expected!

Eventually the room looked like this:

Little victory pose from Dan here too! Note the incredible Birthday chair!

And here is some of the spread we prepared.

Nail the coconut cups!

All we had to do now was wait...

Wait and cook pizza...

Collectively we also decided to add on a last minute 'surprise' element by shutting the door to this room until it was needed. So when Lucy turned up we all said our Happy Birthdays and the like, made small talk to distract Lucy from asking why the door was shut and while we waited for the pizza to cook. Longest 5 minutes of my life. Eventually it was all done and I nonchalantly said 'Shall we go into the dining room? Lucy could you get the door, my hands are full with Pizza.'

The look on her face was worth every second of effort put into making that room what it was. She was holding back tears of happiness she told us. She deserved it too for being an all round lovely person and a great friend.

Happy Birthday Lucy!