Flashback: Epic 5 year-old birthday cake

For Grace's 5th birthday, almost a year ago, she wanted a my little pony cake for months before. She wanted Twilight Sparkle. How on earth do you make a pony cake? Should I just do a square cake and frost a picture of Twilight on the top? Should I do a little figurine of Twilight, like I did with Hello Kitty? I pondered this for months. I know that sounds a little ridiculous.

At Grace's preschool, the birthday child was invited to bring cupcakes for snack time. This gave me two opportunities to do a fun twilight confection for Grace, so I took two approaches. In my mind, one was an epic win and the other was an epic fail. Either way, it was EPIC! I needed it to be epic, because I had just been hired at my new job and would start four days after her birthday. I needed this cake to count for at least two birthdays, since I knew I wouldn't be able to put as much time into her cakes in the future.

First, epic win: cupcakes!

I purchased edible black ink markers just for the occasion. They were adorable.

Now, the epic fail: the cake. Ok, maybe not so much epic fail, but I definitely bit of more than I could chew. I decided to sculpt Twilight Sparkle into a cake! The process was thrilling and terrifying. I don't even remember how much time it took. It was a labor of love, and I didn't care.

Now, before you see the picture, I need to warn you, the head fell off and smacked face first on the counter before I got a picture. For the picture's sake, and for the birthday song, I carefully balanced the head back on the cake and tried to quickly finish the mane to cover up some damage. I wasn't quite done with the mane, but compromised structural integrity forced me to make concessions. But, the face and ear did get squished, and I couldn't cover that up so well...

Grace didn't seem to mind. Look at that tongue, hungrily licking her lips.

As the situation has it, I'm not planning on making a cake for Grace this year. We have bigger plans in the works, which I no doubt will post about eventually. Just over two weeks until her 6th birthday!

Piano Duet

Egg Hunts

I'm not sure when Easter became all about plastic egg hunts, but somewhere between my childhood and the childhood of my children. With almost no planning at all, we lucked out with two Easter egg hunts in one day!

The first one was in the park across the street from our house. It was put on as a service project by the Middle School Student Council.

Our friend who lives nearby stopped by our house to tell us about it. Here is her daughter with my kids. I took 7 pictures of these three standing there. All 7 have my friend's daughter standing nicely in the middle and smiling. All 7 have my kids holding a different pose and/or face expression in each.

By the way, Grace was super proud of her outfit in the above picture. What you can't see is that she's wearing a sweater that matches her legwarmers almost perfectly.

Later in the afternoon, we were lucky enough to have an egg hunt with cousins at my sister's house. For this one the eggs were actually kind of hiding, which makes it way more fun.

Portraits by Grace

In January Grace drew portraits of each of us that characterized our dreams, then she taped the pictures on our bedroom doors. It was really sweet.

For herself, she dreams of fairies night and day, so of course, she is a fairy.

At the time, Henry was slightly obsessed with Batman, so Grace drew Henry as batman.

Scott is currently chasing his dream of being a doctor.

Then I got to mine and I just stared.

Mom, the martian? It took me about three minutes to realize that she had drawn me as Fiona from Shrek the musical which I was in a year and a half before. I guess that is a dream I chase--being on stage. More and more as Grace gets older, she surprises me with her thoughtfulness and insight.

The last couple days

Grace made sweet conversation with a pair of worms as they explored their way across the pavement.

Henry confidently pumped his legs on the peddles of his hand-me-down bike with glee. Every so often his momentum would stop or he'd get stuck on an uphill slope, so he informed me, "when I ring my bell, that means I need you to push me." I heard the delicate jingle of the bell every other minute while we were outside. I think he rang the bell more to make sure I was still giving him my attention than when he actually needed help.

Henry and Grace both leaned against me for nearly an hour as we read book after book on the beanbags in the library. It has been almost a year since I've taken them to the library, which makes me a little sad. When we got home, all they wanted to do was read their library books over and over again. Grace picked out two Halloween books from the library. She still loves Halloween.

 On a car ride Henry said, "Someday I want to be a bird."
Grace followed with, "Someday I want to be a flying cat mermaid. Actually, a flying cat mermaid ...princess ...fairy."

Wow.

I couldn't resist: