POST POST PARTY

It wasn't easy getting through a children's birthday party for 22 yesterday, although at least it wasn't in my house. I wouldn't have been able to cope with that at all, given the damage done by my teenage son and his friend's the night before. It's one of those "slow burn" scenario's after a teenage party. Initially, there are the obvious signs. Vomit by bed. Bloody great hole in garden shed, cigarette butts everywhere, you know the sort of thing.

Then the more subtle ones start appearing like you knew they would because teenage son was up earlier than you on a Sunday morning for the first time in his entire life and tidied up hugely and stood there with an inane grin on his face created by a combination of huge guilt and delight that things were not far worse.

So far, I have discovered these additional damages:-

1 x dead goldfish (although tank too high to urinate or vomit in so unless fed vodka suspect it was just a coincidence).
1 x broken kitchen cupboard door
1 x broken bottle of vodka all over garden patio
1 x god knows what up walls of downstairs loo
1 x broken agapanthus flower (which I'm very upset about because I only had two and after about a year of growing it was just about to do something interesting)

I also discovered that after my son kicked everybody out, a group of them went on to cause yet more havoc at the house of a friend of mine.

Anyway. No major damage. Nobody dead. So forget it.

My nearly 9 year old (tomorrow) said to me as I put him to bed "thank you for the best party ever". He's obviously already forgotten about it though because this morning he asked me if he could have a surprise party tomorrow as well.

It did go well his party yesterday - mainly because half way through the ice cream van arrived playing that pavlovian plinky plonky music:-



I asked my really-in-trouble-teenage-son to take photos of the event and I have about 85,000 pictures that look like this:-






He thought that was really, really funny.