A party in the forest

I am still amazed that Yashar is now 1. What a year it has been. Lots of changes. Lots of adjusting and lots of fun and happiness.

For his little party we put up some autumny forest decorations after being inspired by our recent visit to Belgrade Forest (which was so pretty, calm and green that I will definitely be posting a few pictures from there soon). Nothing overboard with the decorations - at this age the kids didn't even notice the decorations were there and, of course, I think handmade decorations are the best kind! Yashar and I went for a walk and collected some gorgeous Autumn leaves that are blowing around and piling up on the paths at the moment. Then I sewed some together just using a needle and thread to make the chains of them and attached the rest of them to the walls using blu-tac.

We got the poster on our trip to Sweden - so gorgeous! And the little boy in it has something Yashar'ish about him. It is by Elsa Beskow who wrote and illustrated children's books and I think this illustration was originally from a song book. Her illustrations are some of my all time favourites. Some of the books have been translated into English and are just beautiful. (We also bought Children of the Forest while we were there.)



And of course there was the cake! I made a bunny from the same book that my mum made our cakes from - Australian Women's Weekly Childrens Birthday Cake Book -
we used to love looking through the book and choosing the cake we would have that year - I particularly remember loving the piano cake with the little music book sitting on it. The cover looks a little dodgy but this is a great book! I cheated a bit though and bought the cakes to make it up - no oven makes baking pretty hard!