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It was J's birthday: she is now the same age as I was when we brought her home from her three months in neonatal intensive care, the age I would have been had she been born on the expected date. I've now been caring for her for just over half my life. I was somewhat ambivalent about her first few birthdays, because they brought back memories of a day when nothing went to plan and all our expectations were overturned; but that is long ago. Now, we celebrate her enthusiasm, the things she has achieved despite all the limitations she has to work with, her imagination and creativity, her joy in many little things, and her resilience even through the significant and as yet untreated additional health problems she has had to face over the past eighteen months.

We had a nice, if somewhat low key day. Her PA M arrived with a gift of a paint spinner, a larger and better version of the childhood one that no longer worked, and they spent the morning experimenting with it. I made chocolate peanut butter cake, a very easy Nigella recipe which is delicious despite its inelegance: looking back through J's Facebook memories, we find chocolate cake after chocolate cake with over-soft frosting running down the side, crooked candles, and, as here, the top sliding sideways off the bottom because the two tins did not rise evenly. They always taste better than they look. She blew out the candles with huge effort, P holding the cake as close as he dared while I held her hands down to stop her tipping it off the plate. 

Later, J and I enjoyed pizza and a movie. We watched Belle, a 2014 film described by Mark Kermode as a "costume drama with teeth", in which a young black woman, the orphaned illegitimate daughter of a white aristocratic father and a black mother, grows up as companion to her white cousin in genteel eighteenth century society; her personal story is interwoven with issues of race, gender and the slave trade. We both liked it and found it interesting, a good end to an indulgent day.