My son’s birthday is coming! It’s on june 25th. This year he’ll get 2 birthday parties (and 2 cakes.. hmmm). One next week with us, my mom in law and some of his friends and another one the week after once we are in Canada with my family.

This year it will be a pirate party. Nothing fancy, just a couple of decorations, a treasure chest pinata and some gold coins for the kids. He wants a strawberry cake “same as last year mom please”, so this is going to be easy: I bought it at the bakery downstairs. Not cheap but well worth it: lots and lots of fresh strawberries in a thick fresh cream custard on a light vanilla biscuit. I’ll make some banana cakes, blueberries muffins and chocolate cupcakes to complete.

I got some cool pirate invitations (those you can personalized) and for gifts he’ll get two sets of pirates Playmobil (because they are not made in China….both of these are made in Germany):

This is not the first blog I move to self hosted WP. In fact this is the third one. The only reason I didn’t do it earlier is time. Time and fatigue (my thyroid got lazy, but that’s another story). So finally today was the day. I had the URL and basic setup since a couple of month. All I needed was a theme. I like simple, so I picked “Magazine Basic”. It’s a nice clean looking theme, with 3 columns and enough customization to suit my needs. I installed my favorite plugins:

• Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin (instead of Akismet. The Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin is totally free. It adds a client side generated checkbox to the comment form. Bots wont see it so it effectively kills Bot spams.
• Simple Trackback Validation
• Quick Cache (it does help if your blog has lots of pictures, makes it faster to load. Google hates slow site)
• Hotlink Protection (don’t want thieves to use my bandwidth)
• Artiss YouTube Embed
• Amazon Widgets Shortcodes
• AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons
• AddToAny: Subscribe Button

I welcome any suggestion for other cool and useful (and free) plugins!

My son had received some cute Robeez when he was born, but that was when we were living in Canada. Now for my daughter I was looking for a local brand and found Starchild, an UK company. Local enough for me. Plus they are not made in China. So I picked these cute pink soft leather shoes featuring a mouse and a piece of cheese. They are not too expensive and Starchild offers a lot of fun designs.