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Once I got beyond the trauma of my little baby turning 3 last week, I did manage to make her her annual kitty cake and dress.   The child has adored kitties since before she ever saw one.

Being that I was too lazy busy to make a kitty shaped cake like I did last year, I opted for a cake decorated with toy kitties.  It was really quick to make and in the long run makes more sense because now she has the kitties to keep and play with whenever she wants.

After wandering the grocery store for 30 minutes trying to come up with ideas on how to decorate a cake with kitties on it I ended up with a cake that consisted of green icing with coconut dyed green for the grass.  Pretzel rods and marshmallows (dyed green again) for the trees.  A few nilla wafers for a path and yogurt drops for flowers or rocks or something…I don’t know, but they looked nice.  

My favorite part was the mice made from licoice gum drops with little tails and ears made from pieces of cut licorice and glued on with black gel icing.  If only I was smart enough to have taken a close up picture of them.

The result was that Alexandra actually squealed, “kitties!” when she saw the cake, which was adorable, but meant I probably could have placed the toy kitties on a plain cake with no icing on it and gotten the same reaction.

Oh well.

Today is mama’s 41st birthday.  (she said I shouldn’t write her age, but it’s my post so I have creative control.) 

Now normally it really wouldn’t faze me that it’s her birthday, but it does mean we will have ice cream cake later in the day and that’s a very good thing.  (daddy, let this serve as a reminder to get me…I mean mama, an ice cream cake after work.)

Plus she let me take some photos of her for her birthday, since the twins aren’t here to do it.

Now keep in mind, I will be the first to admit, my photo taking skills need some work.  It’s really hard to aim at something and then press that little button at the same time.

This is mama’s knee and the room she was sitting in when I took the photos.

And me on her lap (I’m even cute blurry.)

And then mama took over camera duties for a photo.

Happy Birthday Mama!

Yesterday was my Aunt Dawn’s birthday.

I love birthdays, there’s always cake and most importantly, ice cream….  and since it’s a special day, I get as much ice cream as I want.  And I got to help make the cake, and eat the coconut as we were making it.

I also get to help blow out the candles, although there was only one cnadle on this cake; and it was a zero. 

I’m not sure what that was all about but mom said something about after a certain age….  So I’m guessing she’s gonna want the zero candle on her cake next week too, since she’s only a year younger than Aunt Dawn.

Big People make no sense, more candles to blow out is more fun…

We went to the Lehigh Valley Zoo for my birthday.

I love animals, so it was lots of fun.

We fed the fish, and watched the penguins.

 We played wolves in the wolf den….although we didn’t see any wolves.

My favorite part was feeding the pretty birdies nectar from a cup.

My sister and I loved that: my brother, not so much.  He screamed when one landed on his shoulder and scared a few kids off from coming in to the birds….it was kinda funny, but don’t tell him I said that.

After the zoo we went on a bike ride and I screamed alot. 

I was tired. 

The zoo was exhausting. 

I can’t be expected to be cute and adorable all the time.

Our baby turns 2 today. 

My cousin is quick to point out that she’s not a baby anymore; but I just ignore her.

Alexandra will always be my baby.

The birthday party is over.  Thank God.  Now things get back to normal.  We ended up with the football and butterfly themed party this year.  Not too bad of a mix of themes, although I had to really push Jarod to the football theme and away from spiderman. We had a football cake and piñata, and a butterfly shaped cake and piñata (with butterflies painted on it….I was not going to try to shape a paper mached balloon into a butterfly.  Making a pony last year was hard enough).   And we did a treasure hunt and football toss game.

Football Cake and Pinata

Butterfly Cake and Pinata

Football Toss Game

They loved the treasure hunt, who knew searching for an aluminum foil covered box with candy and a few coins in it could be so much fun.   To appease the ‘fairness police’ at our house we put the same amount of coins in an envelope for each of the kids, so they all got the same treasure.  Somehow they forgot that they were supposed to have an Easter egg hunt too.  I lucked out on that, but I’m sure they’ll remember one of these days and we will be having a Thanksgiving egg hunt.

I’ll put up some directions for making the piñatas another day when I finish typing them up in case you’d like to make one of your own.

My babies are 7 today.

How does this happen…you know, time just did not go by this quickly before I had kids.  Plus there’s the constant reminder of, ‘gee, if they’re seven already…and I had them when I was 33….’  My own birthdays I can ignore, their’s I can’t.

But the twins don’t really care about today, all they care about is the party.  They woke up saying “Four more days till our birthday.”  I had to remind them that their birthday is today and Saturday is just the party. 

And yes, we’ve decided on themes  football and butterflies.  Which isn’t too bad of a combination, at least both things fly thru the air.  However, I refuse to try to shape a piñata into a butterfly.  It will be a plain balloon shape painted sky blue with butterflies then painted on it.

So we survived the ‘vacation’ and even the return home with all its fun unloading, unpacking and laundry.
Now it is time to move forward and on to the next event….and it’s a big one….the birthday party.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that there should be a party for the mom on the child’s birth day. A day to celebrate and reminisce on having carried them for nine months and then having gone thru the ‘joy’ of childbirth for hours and hours on end; but, I suppose we have to stick with tradition.
In our house it’s actually, parties, plural, since there are two of them and they each want their own theme. And remember, we have boy girl twins so we end up trying to combine the spiderman and pony party or nascar and flowers party into one. The decorations are tough. They each have their own piñata….homemade piñata I might add, because some insane person (ok, it was me) thought it would be cute if we made homemade piñatas and matching cakes a tradition back when they were two, and now there is no way out of doing them.
I’ve tried putting the party off a week, but naturally the kids balked at that idea, so we’ve got just five days to plan the parties and make the stuff. Oh, and did I mention we’re also doing a scavenger hunt since I promised that a month ago while I forgot that we were already slated to do an Easter egg hunt. Our egg hunt got rained out this year and I forgot that I said we’d do that at their birthday party, and they didn’t remind me of it until after I said we’d do a scavenger hunt.
Luckily I’ve found a good party planning website that I’m sure I’ll find time to search through at about 2 am one of these nights. Birthday party ideas 4 kids, has lots of ideas for decorating and games, although I doubt there’s any for the racecar/unicorn theme with a scavenger hunt and an Easter egg hunt, but we’ll try.