Leanne's 21st Birthday

Well, I can't believe that my baby girl is all grown up and has actually turned 21. I can still vividly remember planning and having my 21st and it was fun. I am a member of PDAC (athletics club) so was able to book the clubhouse for the party. We arranged a lamb and pork on spit with a noddle salad and a green salad with cocktail rolls. The food was great and it was thanks to the staff of Le Ouma Spit Braais who did the cooking.

2 years ago at one of my scrapping lessons, I decided that I wanted to do an album for Leanne to give to her on her 21 st. I wanted it to have all her photos including some of her great great family. So, now the trick was to do this without her knowing about it so that it could be a surprise. That was really difficult and every spare moment that she was not around, I would sneak into her room to pull out her photo albums to see what photos I could get copied, scanned and then printed. She refused to let me have any of her photos as she said that I would just cut them all up - including her school group photos!! How wrong she was! Anyway, I was slowly getting there, and her more recent photos, I managed to very diplomatically say that I needed her help in chosing some as I wanted to do a page for my album in memory of certain of her achievements - she fell for it and happily selected photos for the page. Nedless to say, she often didn't see the finished product!! how sneaky is that, hey.

Normally at a 21st, there is a collage of the person from when they were a baby to current events, and Dereck managed to scan the photos from the scrapbook album (as they had all been used and weren't in the album Leanne thought they would be!) and printed them in colour onto paper. I them cut them out and made a collage. Leanne wasn't too impressed that we couldn't even use photos!! On night of her party, after we had done the speech, I called her over and said that there was a present she just had to open there and then. I gave her this huge present which was 3 albums which she duly opened. Her face and comments were priceless and it was all worth the effort in putting the albums together. She was totally shocked and even expressed surprise at some of the photos I had managed to get.

Leanne is a real Winnie the Pooh fan and the theme of her party was just that. She received a lovely bouquet of flowers with a Winnie the Pooh sitting in it from Jemma, Zippa & Izzy (the dogs).

Dessert for the evening was a chocolate fountain with meringues, donuts, finger biscuits,wafers and marshmallows for dunking. Wow, this was really yummy. The chocolate came from Ariba chocolates and I was told was the absolute best. They were quite correct!!

Sticking with the Winnie the Pooh tradition, the 21st cake had his picture on it. This came from Milky Lane and was really tasty being half vanilla and half chocolate.

As Leanne doesn't drink champagne, we celebrated with a shooter of Apple Sours.

Once we got home it was just after 12, so Leanne started opening her presents. She received quite a bit of money which will help with some things she needs for her overseas trip.

Dereck and I decided to give her some money in the form of a voucher, to go towards purchasing a laptop once she is in the UK. I didn't want to just give her an envelope, so Dereck and I made an A4 voucher and had it laminated. I found a box at work and then a large rock in the garden which I put in the box to make it feel heavy and then the voucher on the top. What a surprise she got when she opened it as the voucher stuck to the lid of the box and all she saw was the rock!!!! Her face showed shock until she was the laminated piece of paper and as she read it, you could see how happy she was.

All in all a great evening and another milestone in my life having been reached. I will be photographing her album and will post the layouts on the blog as soon as I can, so please be patient.

Proud mom signing off .........