In which Katie had a birthday. By Bessie

On Saturday Mummy and Katie went to visit Aunty Mic and see baby Louisa.    They put the garmin sat nav thingy in the car and Daddy said "Don't take the motorway.  It took us six hours just to get to Stoke last weekend."

So they went up the Monmouth road.  But the garmin was being stupid and only wanted to find the motorway.  Now I'm not saying Mummy is some kind of navigational genius, far from it, but she generally doesn't need sat nav to find the motorway.   The massive blue signs are normally a big clue where the motorway is.  So she ignored the sat nav and thought, it's ok, soon it will work out that we are now too far from any motorway and it will find the A49.

She was wrong.    They left the house at 8:10am.   They arrived at Brecon at 9.10am.   The sat nav spent the entire journey trying to make her turn round and go back the way they come.   So they stopped to look at a map.  But they had no road map in the car and neither of them could get a mobile signal.   So they decided as they were way too far west and with no way of navigating east without getting stuck in the mountains the only thing they could do was do as the sat nav said and go back the way they came.  So they did.  They drove back all the way to Abergavenny at which point they saw a sign for Hereford and Katie remembered that the route they needed to take took them right through Hereford.  So they took the Hereford road.   Incidentally the sat nav was still trying to get them to go back to the motorway.  If they had done this they would have ended up back at the motorway junction one mile from our house.

At 10.20 they reached Hereford.  A journey that should have taken one hour.  Not two hours ten minutes.  Anyway by this point they felt they deserved a McDonalds breakfast (I beg to differ.  You can't blame the satnav for your own stupidity).    There was something wrong with the air conditioning inside McDonalds and the noise was drilling into Mummy and Katie's heads so they took their food to the tables outside and ate while watching three children misbehaving in a car while their parents sat inside eating their food.  Strange family.

Then they drove to Aunty Mic's.  As they left McDonalds car park they got behind a truck.   It was doing an ok speed though so they were happy to stick behind it singing their lame soft rock ballads.  Mummy said it was like Thelma and Louise except nobody got to sleep with Brad Pitt and they didn't have to kill themselves at the end.    Mummy needed to put petrol in the car but as they got to the petrol station the truck pulled in and Mummy said she couldn't go after him cos she had been sat behind him for the last hundred miles and he would think he had a stalker.  So instead they limped to the next petrol station on fumes.

look what Mummy found in the petrol station

They passed a sign that said "Cats eyes removed."   Katie was horrified until Mummy told her it wasn't a warning, they weren't in Wickerman territory (they probably were though, it was Shropshire).

They got to Aunty Mic's at 2pm and had cuddles with baby Louisa.   Katie had never held a real life baby before, not that she could remember anyway.   She loved baby Louisa.    Uncle Rob couldn't remember her name and kept calling her Charlotte.  Grandad called her Isabella.

They had tea at Grandma and Grandad's and slept on Grandma and Grandad's couch.  The next day Mummy and Grandma took Katie to Manchester to buy some clothes for her birthday.    She got loads of stuff.  She got shoes and three t-shirts and two pairs of shorts and a shirt and a vest and a necklace and some badges and blue hair dye (which looks very nice and cool) and some posters for her bedroom.   And they went to the Arndale Centre which Mummy used to go to all the time when she was young but hadn't been since a few weeks before the bombings.  And they went to Afflecks Palace which Katie loved.  Mummy knew she would, it was always her favourite place when she was a teenager.   There was some funny people in Manchester.   A man who looked like a Roy Orbison tribute act in Druckers cafe.  A man selling little blow up things on a cart in the street shouting "Mickey Mouse Minnie Mouse" in a comedy accent.   (It probably was his real accent, maybe Mummy is being racist telling it like that), a busker who only knew two songs, a girl in shakeaway who put her bag on Katie's chair while Katie was getting her drink.  Then glances up and says, "You can have your chair back in a minute" and carried on rooting round in her back.   Mummy said, "Oh right, that's good of you."   By the way Shakeaway is the most amazing milkshake shop.  You can have practically anything you want in a milkshake.  Mummy had white kinder bueno with marshmallows and white choklit buttons.    Katie had something with ferrero rochers in and Grandma had a latte but she said it tasted funny.  Mummy said it was probably made with icecream too.

I'm not saying Grandma's a bad parker but she had Mummy and Katie guide her into this spot

When they got back to the car park it was £20 for parking!   £20!!!    It costs £3 in Cardiff and that's a capital city.   When they got home Grandad had cooked Sunday dinner and then they had cake and Katie had candles in hers for her birthday.

Mummy and Katie drove home and got back at about 10pm.   We was all very pleased to see them.   The boy humans had lived on McDonalds all weekend cos Daddy can't cook.  He says he can cook but he never proves it.

On Monday it was Katie's birthday.   Mummy and Daddy had to go to work.  Mummy was supposed to be off but they had done stocktake on Friday and something had gone wrong so her boss asked her to come in.   She finished at three and the minihumans asked her to meet them in Tesco cos they had gone for a walk so she went and got something for tea.  There was a Lego movie cardboard cut out to put your faces in so she made them kneel in it so she could take their photo but then Bryn tripped over and pulled the Lego thing over and the security guard got cross so they ran off.

When Daddy got home Katie opened her presents and then they went out to dinner at Red Hot World Buffet in Cardiff.    This is a restaurant that sells everything.   The humans had for their tea:  chikkin tikka, chikkin, korma, chowmein, lasagne, cottage pie, enchiladas, beefburger, bhajis, icecream and cheesecake.

Yesterday Mummy and Daddy were in work again but the minihumans took us on the field for a run about.   Today Mummy had the day off but she didn't have any money to go anywhere cos she doesn't get paid til tomorrow so we stayed home and played in the garden while she did housework.