Tonight was Emma's first birthday party. Her birthday isn't til next week but she decided she needed one party for friends and neighbours back home and another for Uni friends. This was the party back home, so we drove up north with a car overloaded with sleeping bags, pillows, stereo gear, a helium tank for balloons and several sets of coloured or flashing lights. Oh, and Minnie, one of Emma's Uni friends and a housemate from last year. We met up with Ben (aka Zoomy) later on - he was taking the bus there, and as he doesn't live anywhere near Coventry we couldn't have given him a lift anyway.

When we got to the venue I set up the stereo and the lights then helped everyone inflate the balloons. Of course, where helium is involved you also get people talking with squeaky voices...
Emma had spent the last few days sorting out the music, taking a selection from her CDs and downloading some cheesy music to fill the gaps. Towards the end of the evening, most people were dancing and generally enjoying themselves.

Although quite a few people turned up, there were slightly less than expected and there was a lot of buffet food left over. We ended up with lots of cheese, pork pies, sandwich meat and chicken portions. I'm sure the chicken will make a nice soup. One of Emma's friends bought her a hand held liquidizer as a present, which will be a nice replacement to the one I accidentally melted last year by liquidizing soup which was too hot! We'll have to be careful with this one because it is a good quality model.