A little late, but I should mention Eloïse’s third birthday, which was last Monday.
It had been preceded by a birthday party the previous Friday at her peuterspeelzaal, but the real party was on the birthday Monday itself. That turned out to be very well timed, because the weather was gorgeous and it happened to be the second day of Pentecost (Tweede Pinksterdag), or whatever it’s called in English, which is a bank holiday here.
The birthday party proper was a real success, with lots of Eloïse’s friends in attendance.
She was positively snowed under with presents; too much so, in fact. Even the recently reattached Irish branch of the family sent a couple of T-shirts and a card. Thanks to everyone who attended and helped make it such a terrific event.
Sarah baked the cake and helped Eloïse blow out the candles. She seemed to really enjoy being the centre of attention for the day, which is funny, because she’s normally quite shy. Of course, she was in her home environment, which helps.
Eloïse’s main presents were a Mijn Eerst Laptop (My First Laptop) computer and a Kidizoom digital camera.
The quality of the pictures taken by the digital camera are pretty awful, but that seems to be of no concern to Eloïse, who happily snaps away at anything and everything. They’re supposedly VGA (640×480), but there’s so much noise in the photos that they remind me of the first generation of digital cameras from the mid-nineties.
The laptop is fun. It has keys with all of the numbers and letters, but it’s not a QWERTY keyboard. It’s not a real laptop, either, of course, but a set of educational number and letter games in a laptop-like casing. You choose an activity and then it tells you what to do. The laptop even comes with its own little mouse and one of the activities trains the child in its use. Eloïse’s already made some progress on the machine in the last few days and seems to enjoy it.
Both the camera and laptop were things that Eloïse had requested for her birthday without any prompting. You can imagine why she might have thought they would be fun to have: Mama and Papa spend an awful lot of time playing with theirs.