Balloons, Birthday Cake & Marshies

My brother in law and his wife live 3 hours away from us. Because of this distance, we all make a conscious effort taking turns to visit regularly. This is especially true when it comes to celebrating birthdays or other special occasions. On a recent visit to The Shady Pine, our gorgeous little niece, also our god daughter, was to celebrate her 3rd birthday.

As my sister in law is pregnant with her second at the moment, we offered to have the family birthday gathering at our place to hopefully save her a little work.


Mr Shady Pine organised the helium balloons which looked wonderful on the night floating high up in the vaulted ceiling. My sister in law and I brought our gathering of birthday decorations together and set a princess party themed table. We had princess paper cups and princess rings and party hats. Lot's of lollies were laid out because when it's your birthday it's ok to eat a sausage and a strawberry snake in a single meal.

Only that week I had found a trio of lolly themed bowls. The singular bowl that won me over however and made me part with some cash was the one with the marshmallows on it. You see my niece and her grammy have a special relationship and one that is firmly cemented by a consistent supply of marshmallows on grammy's part. My niece calls them marshies. Her little eyes light up just at the sight of these fluffy little treats which will forever more be called marshies in our family.


Mr Shady Pine and his brother organised the preparation and cooking of the barbecue, we had generous family bring home made sausage rolls and freshly baked ciabatta bread sticks. Others pitched in with making the salads and finally, my mother in law made the cake which we decorated with pink icing and mini marshies of course. So with everyone pitching in, the whole family function seemed to come together perfectly.


The cake candles were blown out and relit and blow out again. There was an impromptu launching of a couple of helium balloons from the deck which were watched until the little dot in the sky could no longer be seen. And at the end of the evening we had one very happy and tired little 3 year old girl who no doubt slept dreaming of pink princess dresses and pink icing and probably pink marshies too.