My mother turned 60 today! My dad organised a party for her – booking out a whole Chinese restaurant and filling all 10 tables. I couldn’t believe he managed to fit 100 people and a mini-band into that place. It was tad insane. But my mother had a blast!

A few weeks ago, I arranged her birthday present – a professionally taken family portrait. I’m actually not a big fan of these studio portraits – I prefer a more “relaxed and natural” feel. Anyway… my mother had been bugging us to get studio portraits done for, um, 7 years? We just never got around to it! So on Saturday we finally got organised – we all got dressed up, met up at the studio, took the photos, then went out for lunch. Quite painless actually.

However, it was really tough trying to get my boys to stay still and SMILE. A week in advanced, I carefully explained the whole process to my boys. We set up a little photo studio in our living room, complete with tripod and backdrop, and we practiced our SMILES. On the day – we had to bribe the 4 year old with chocolate ice cream, and the 2 year old simply refused to smile. Now he’ll definitely be remembered as The Grumpy One. Oh well.

At the dinner, we unveiled the photos and everyone loved them (read:thankfully it didn’t look crap). Us siblings gave a little speech, my dad sang a song for my mum, my mum cut the cake, we made my parents kiss for 60 seconds, everyone got drunk and engaged in a mass karaoke. It got really noisy at the end. All the families with small children had to leave early.

Anyway, the cutest moment for me that night – Sean gave everyone his EEEEEEEEE-SMILE all evening.