Who ate all the tarts?

Betty thoroughly enjoyed her birthday knees-up on Sunday. She spent most of the time high-speed crawling around the room sneakily swiping jam tarts and fairy cakes from everyone's plates and shoveling them into her mouth like she hadn't eaten for a year. As well as stealing cakes, she also plucked a dummy right out of the mouth of a sleeping baby, which she callously discarded when she realised it wasn't edible.

Betty delighted in the big pink and red balloons, and the wrapping paper, and the candle on top of her birthday cake, and playing pass-the-parcel, and all the attention. She was very graceful and didn't mind the other babies playing with all her toys and trashing her playroom. She even turned a blind eye when a couple of pieces of her building blocks fell out of a toddler's pocket as he was picked up by his mum to leave. The mother looked mortified; the toddler looked gutted.

We had a champagne toast after we sung Happy Birthday, but unfortunately (or fortunately for me and Tom) everyone was either driving, teetotal, or underage, so after everyone had left, we went round knocking back all the untouched glasses of champers scattered around the room. My great aunt, our only remaining guest, watched on and gave me a pitiful look.

Everyone seemed to have a jolly old time though, and several mums were very complimentary. One mum even openly admitted that she was going to copy some of my ideas for her son’s impending first birthday. I looked at her modestly and said: ‘I’ve never had to organise a children’s party before, and had no idea what I was doing, do you really think it was OK?