June. A birthday month. A month of birthday

Starting with Al's big one. Which I'm probably not meant to mention. So let's just keep it at 'The beginning of June was marked by Al's birthday' and say no more. A number of events followed, many of which will never be in the public domain, because Al fell off her chair whilst making a speech and it wouldn't be appropriate to publicise this, or post career-limiting videos.

But Hatty's birthday - her seventh - fell at the end of the month, so family celebration of the two milestones rolled together into last Sunday. The usual 'lots of food and drink and all round our house' kind of affair that seems to have become the done thing, with us - again - breaking the record for the number of people we crammed into the front room. Twenty-seven. There seems to be no limit to this annual event's aspirations.

And Tuesday was Hatty's actual birthday, so we made her wait until I got home from work to open her presents. In years gone by, shrieks and screams would have peaked over Barbie and Ken. Nowadays, they're held back for expensive - and impressive - chunks of technology. Good: Ken looks a right slime, if you ask me.

Which left the schoolfriend's celebration. Or schoolgirlfriends, to be more accurate, since seven year-old girls unerringly conclude that their 14 favourite classmates are all the girls and the boys are at the bottom of the list, which fails to secure them an invite.

So... fourteen bundles of energetic screamshriek for two hours, bouncing the crap out of themselves on trampolines and giggling their way through tea in falsetto. I think it would have been much funnier to try this the other way round but it's not allowed, apparently.

July will be a normal month in our house.