six years old

So Abby had two birthday parties on Saturday. She had her friends over for lunch and the family over for dinner. And I'm not going to lie to you it was a lot of work. On Friday night I contemplating scrapping my complicated cupcake idea, since I was making cupcakes and one giant cake, but I just couldn't let myself do it. In the end Abby was thrilled with them and that made it completely worthwhile.



The horsey cupcakes, courtesy of the Hello Cupcake book, which was courtesy of my pal Normie (thanks again for the loan!!). I attempted one tester and it went together rather easily so I set up a little horsey cupcake production line and cranked out six of them. The rest of them I just iced plain. And since some of the kids picked out a plain cupcake, little Miss Jamie scored a fancy one to take home when she arrived with her Dad to pick up Abby's bestest friend Maddie. If you have the Hello Cupcake or have seen it, then you know mine are a poor imitation, but the target audience triple loved them, so it's all good!



And the cake. I was pleased and a little disappointed with the way it turned out. I did an icing transfer, in which you place a piece of waxed paper over a drawing of your subject and draw it out in icing. Then pop it in the freezer until it's frozen solid at that point you peel the wax paper of and flip it over on the cake. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I really loved that I could do this a few days before and leave it in the freezer until I baked the cake. My pocket book loved this too, since I avoided buying yet another expensive Wilton cake pan. I have already amassed quite an expensive collection. But I was disappointed with the quality of my work. I learned lots though and I plan on being much better for the next cake I have to do.

So the two birthday parties in one day, that will be going the way of the dinosaur. I must be getting old because boy did it knock a lot out of me. Originally the idea behind the two parties in one day was to keep Mike from missing too much work. He is self employed on the weekends and it made more fiscal sense for him to book one day off rather than two. Neither one of us thought that two half days would be the same thing. So next year it will be two parties over two Saturdays.



As luck would have it we had a pretty discouraging weather report for Saturday. It was calling for rain and a lot of it. Since the plan was for the kids to use the bouncer we were going to have to come up with Plan B. So there I was at the dollar store trying to find enough supplies for them all to do the same craft, more or less. We had four girls and one boy coming. So I picked jewelry boxes for the girls and Mike built a wooden truck model for our lone boy to paint. Luckily we managed to avoid the rain for the first 2/3 of the party. So they played some dress up and tea party and then the last little bit we lined them up on the couch and turned on a movie until it was home time.

The evening party was plagued by some mysterious email problem. I always design a cute little photo invitation to email out to the grandparents and other distinguished guests. Turns out this year, no one got them! Even still on very short notice, like Saturday morning in Dave and Mel's case all important invitees were there and accounted for. The party was great, all the people that love Abby most in this world were there. We all ate well, laughed a lot, had an impromptu Relay for Life meeting since 8/10 of the team was there (And yes Robin you are a member of the team!!!) and the kids all bounced until they couldn't bounce anymore.



I'll close with one sweet story. The single boy who Abby invited is the boy she says she's going to marry and have 8 kids with. He called her after he was invited to ask her what kinds of things she liked. Abby told him flowers amongst other things. And didn't he show up with three tissue paper flowers he had made for her. I know..... awwwwww!