GUESS WHO'S 5 YEARS OLD TODAY?

How could I possibly even think of looking for dereliction when we had been invited to a little girl’s 5th birthday?  Ngozi, whom we haven’t seen for about 18 months was 5 years old today and her Mum had invited us to the party held at their home.  

It was great to see them all again and to see how much they had grown - but of course, children have a habit of doing that!  Ngozi is now chatting away and as soon as I gave her the Bus Lotto present we had bought, she talked about matching and knew all the animals, and had great fun matching the animals to the ones on the bus - just a shame I didn’t think to sing the song, “The Wheels on the Bus”!

My main shot is Ngozi looking very pretty in her yellow dress and crown and she was obviously enjoying her birthday - if you look at this shot taken almost 2 years ago, you will see how much she has grown.  

I have put a collage in to show Kosi, her brother,  who is now 2 years old, but because he is so tall, looks a couple of years older and Nazom, her baby sister, who has now also grown a lot since I last saw her when she was about 6 weeks old and is now 7 months old.  Kosi wasn’t very well so every time he came into the room where there was a lot of noise and chatter, he wandered back out again - but I caught this shot when he was watching his Daddy moving the helium balloon away from the food table.  

We were served typical Nigerian food - the coated chicken was very spicy and nearly blew my head off, but Mr. HCB loved it.  We sang Happy Birthday about 20 times in all and Ngozi just took it all in her stride.  Even when she opened her present, which was a lovely scooter, she just looked at it and then wandered away to play with a squidgy rubber pig that she said was gobbling up all the sweeties!  Hopefully she will be more enthusiastic when it’s time to go to school tomorrow and she can use it.

It was a lovely afternoon and it was great to see Nzube and Chi again - they haven’t gone back to Church yet either, so I don’t know when we will see them again, but it was good to catch up with them and hear their news.  While the children played, Nzube and Mr. HCB chatted and I’m sure that Chi and I will still keep in touch via Whatsapp, which we have done for the last 18 months.

Thank you for inviting us to Ngozi’s birthday party - and we hope it won’t be too long before we meet again.

“Happiness is meeting old friends 
     after a long time 
          and feeling that nothing 
               has changed.”
Cris Dar