Ibnat's Birthday

Day before yesterday we celebrated Ibnat's third birthday with a small party. I did not call her friends in school because I presumed they would be busy with family obligations because of Chinese New Year. So it was just our cousins, Ibnat's friend Ashita and her family and a korean neighbour and her daughter.

The three families that were invited did not know each other so we were a bit apprehensive about the guests feeling awkward with each other. But surprisingly the guests got along quite well much to our relief. We talked about careers, children and South Korea (our neighbour gladly fed us information about her homeland). There were four children including Ibnat and Nayaz and it looked like they were having great fun. They were all very fascinated by my gym ball and they were all trying to bounce it together.

I served some finger food first like chicken nuggets and noodles and it was followed by dinner which consisted of "pulao", roasted chicken, kebabs and vegetable. Everbody relished the dinner except our korean neighbour who ate very little as she thought that the snacks that I served earlier was all that dinner consisted of.

The cake was cut after dinner and everbody clapped and sang for Ibnat. We took a couple of pictures. After dinner we sat down to chat while the kids continued to play with the huge gym ball. I did not arrange any games for them because the kids were in any case too young to understand games but I had made goodie bags for them. After distributing the bags I realized that in a hurry I had forgotten to put the "goodies" inside! We had a good laugh over this.

The korean neighbours left first and our cousins stayed back for a while. We had tea and chatted about how we spent our vacations in Dhaka.

Late in the night we opened the gifts and had chocolates. I was relieved that the party was a success.