Life in Brunei

The Lego party

I realized last year that sticking to a theme was an easy way of doing a birthday party! Then you know what you are looking for, and there are lots of ideas to pinch on the internet. The (lacking) access to party supplies here in Brunei proves a challenge, but I think we did a pretty good job with the birthday party this year too!

This is how the invite looked like:

We had chosen a Lego theme this year. About 20 kids were invited but only about 15 could make it.

Here's a few shots of the party room before the guests arrived, we had made a "Creation Station" with nearly all Lucas' Lego, all colour sorted, of course!

We also had a colour-in station set up, for those who didn't feel like building Lego:

There was a "Guess-how-many-Lego-bricks-in-the-jar" game set up. Four people guessed on the same number - 100, and since the right answer was 139 so we had to get them to guess a second time. (Lucas guessed 3000...)

We had all Lucas' little Lego men on display, it looked so cool!

I had also cut out 20 little yellow Lego men and hidden them in the room, but in the end we forgot to get the kids to find them! They were just so busy building..! :)

When the guests arrived, the building could begin! Even though we had all the Lego set instructions available, all the kids chose to be creative, and boy they built some cool things!

The girls both built and coloured-in:

After a while we went outside to do a Lego relay race. The kids got split into two teams and were supposed to move as many Lego pieces from one box to another as they could in a set time, with a Lego spoon! It was a close race, 32-30 in the end.

We also did a team-building game inside, where the kids again were in two teams. They then got a Lego plate each and we rolled a dice to tell each kid how many pieces it could add to the plate when it was his or hers turn. Both teams worked really well together, and built an underwater station and an helicopter landing "dock"!

Oliver did his own thing!

We also played Lego Bingo. The kids got all into it and it was great fun talking about all the different mini figures and how they looked like. Plus, it took quite a while..!

Finally, it was time for cake - a Lego cake of course!
Lucas didn't know how it looked like but he was really happy with his Kai Ninjago cake (the ladies at the Kitchen of Jasmine just love all my different missions I give them, ha ha!)

The cake was inspired by this dude:

Lucas and some of all his presents:

And here are the goodie bags, Lego ones of course! In each bag there was a Lego mini-figure and a Lego colouring-in book, plus some sweets.

School celebration

It was just time after the busy morning at the sports field, to bring some cupcakes in to Lucas' class mates. It's a bit of a tradition for us. I think it's quite nice, since he doesn't get to invite the whole class anymore to his parties - this way everybody gets to celebrate a bit anyway.

He got sung to, but as we hadn't brought any candles he got to "blow out" a balloon instead!

Since the Yellow House had won at Athletics Day, we got Lucas' team mates to pick cupcakes first.

One of his best mates, George:

The boys comparing cupcakes!

Junior School Athletics Day

Yesterday wasn't just a double birthday, it was also a busy day at school - Junior School Athletics Day.
This year was the first year Lucas took part in the Athletics Day out on the field. Whereas the younger year groups just perform different sports disciplines for fun, year 3-5 compete properly, with ribbons for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in each discipline plus cups for the overall best performers of each year group.

I'm not quite sure how they decided, or got decided for them, which disciplines they were participating in, all I know is Lucas didn't do all of them.
Here he's running 400m, he's in a yellow shirt since he's in Yellow House:

He also did long jump:

And here he is on 100m. He didn't win any ribbons but at least he was smiling and seemed to enjoy himself! Yellow House did win the overall competition though - go Yellow House!