Noah's birthday

I can hardly believe my little boy is ten. The drama surrounding his birth really seems like yesterday, to think before he was born we had not really had any dealings with the NZ health system (apart from Paul working for it) then within his first year we had done two air ambulance flights, a helicopter ride, two ambulance journey's, five days on a ventilator, two major operations, three weeks in intensive care and another nine weeks on other hospital wards and had diagnoses of Down syndrome, persistent pulmonary hypertension, long segment Hirschsprung's disease and infantile spasms.

But today Noah couldn't care less about his medical history, he just wanted to get on and celebrate his birthday. He was so enthusiastic that when he got up at 5am and discovered I hadn't yet decorated his cake, he decided to do it himself.

Unfortunately this meant sticking a candle right through the middle of the expensive icing picture of Wall-e that I had spent a long while finding and buying from trade me.

This was one of the times when we didn't need to tell Noah off - he was so sad when he realised that he had broken his special icing. I had a go at major Wall-e reconstruction and saved the bits of cardboard that came with his party hats etc and used them to decorate the cake so we ended up with this salvage model....

Noah really enjoyed his party, he only invited three children (all with special needs) and didn't mind whether they joined in the games or not. We adapted the words of Farmer's in the Den to "Wall-e wants an Eve" then "Eve wants a plant" and Noah thought this was amazingly clever and went on singing all night!

Beth, James and Anika had driven down from Auckland for a long weekend (Sam had to work so couldn't come) and Anika gave Noah the remote control Wall-e that she and Sam had bought during their holiday in the UK (It took up almost all their suitcase!). Noah loved it.

We are now trying to think of all the things we can get Noah to do by saying "Now you are ten you are old enough to...." Noah thinks it should be "go to school by yourself" but we are trying "get yourself dressed in the morning" and "eat fruit".