Happy 6th Birthday to Benjamin!

We celebrated Benjamin's 6th birthday Saturday. Normally we celebrate in the US, with our family there, but since we returned to France before December this year, it was just *too* early for that. So we decided to allow Benjamin to invite some of his school friends over to celebrate with him. 

He was a little disappointed that we had to limit his list to only kids whose parents we knew at least by sight, but we ended up inviting four kids from school, and Frédéric's friend's two kids, so with our two there were eight altogether, which was a good number.

 We were kind of amazed that some of the parents just dropped their kids off, since we don't know any of them all that well. One mom did stay, though, and she was the one who did the face-painting at the school party. She offered to paint the kids' faces, and we gladly accepted. 

Benjamin was enraptured with all of his presents, which included a solar system floor puzzle, Bakugans, Gormitis, and a puzzle-game called Tipover.

If that is not enraptured, I don't know what is.

  After months of telling us he wanted an Astérix and Obélix cake, at the last minute (as in, just before I would have had to order Astérix and Obélix pans online), Benjamin decided he wanted a soccer ball cake instead. Fortunately, we were still in the US, so we hied ourselves to Michael's to buy a soccer ball pan. And Frédéric made this amazing cake (feel free to admire my contribution, the beautiful lettering, as well):

Benjamin was sorely disappointed that we had the kids sing happy birthday to him in French rather than in English.

But he got over it in time to blow out the candles.

Despite some of the parents' unwillingness to stay for the party, we did entice one set of them in for coffee after the party, so it wasn't a total failure as far as getting to know some of the parents a little bit better.