Birthday Gaming

Joshua's 11th birthday arrived quite early yesterday morning.  After teasing him mercilessly that his much wanted and long awaited PS3 was out of stock in town (only partly true as Game truly had run out, but we 'forgot' to mention HMV had them in), we managed to convince him we'd arranged a special courier delivery service to have it at the house by 9.00am.  This was our feeble and very wishful attempt at not being woken at some unearthly hour by a boy who for the last two weeks has established a 5.30am waking habit because he's so excited about the big day.  He didn't need to know the 'courier' was Dad, delivering it from the wardrobe in our bedroom.

At 7.30am it was plugged in and ready to go.  He was plugged in and ready to go two weeks ago when he found out that Grandparents hadn't bought him presents as they had contributed to it too.

But in addition to being the Birthday Boy and really rather special for the day he was also tagged with the label of Most Awesome Big Brother by Eleanor and Sam who have now inherited 'free of charge' his now redundant PS2.  Sam's already picked up some pretty nifty moves with the Ratchet and Clank games and is now teaching Eleanor how to work through the levels. 

So, a quiet, but happy gaming day for him, followed by a chocolate birthday cake and Chinese delivery.  We still can't get us all in one car so a trip to a local restaurant was out of the question. But not being ones to let a thing like that get us down, we decided a bit of the restaurant would come to us instead.

So yesterday, Andy and I were the best parents ever. I'm going to remind him later today that we still are - it doesn't hurt a kid to be reminded of basic facts like that :-)

The real party is tomorrow night.  Six of his friends meeting him at the swimming pool for a couple of hours swimming, back to ours for gaming, pizza, DVD, midnight feast and sleepover.

The girls have friends over too. Lilos have been brought down from the loft, extra pillows have been plumped up, stocks of goodies stashed in the kitchen, another birthday cake baked by Dad and the Sega Game Gear dug out for the retro gaming corner.

It's gonna be a fun one!