Belated Birthdays

I'm overdue to catch up on birthday posts.  So here are a bunch of belated birthdays...

In July Irene turned 4 - she did not mind at all that I got the color scheme wrong on her Elsa birthday cake! 

Four is such a delightful age.   It seems like she is getting smarter by the minute...and she learns SO much from her older siblings! 

Also in July, Don came visit and we celebrated his turning the big 4-oh

Caleb turned 13 (13!) in September.

His cake was a chocolate hurricane:

And Annalise turned 11 in October - this is a dropped ice cream cone cake:

We learned that you need to let the ganache cool and thicken a bit before you pour it over the cake and also that you should make the ice cream part of the cake out of a light colored cake - not chocolate!

Her birthday welcomed two little cuties to our family - Peanut and Nutmeg, they are Robo Dwarf Hamsters.

Natalie's Birthday

June has come and gone and with it - Natalie's birthday.  She turned 8 this year.  Does that make anyone else feel like they are older than they thought they were? 

She really liked this cake even though it is not homemade.  We are renovating the kitchen and I am not baking anything these days.  Naturally those things take longer than you expect they will and the whole thing is making Natalie's planned birthday party farther and farther from her actual birthday.  It will be Paris themed though.  Natalie wants to learn French and go to Paris.

Dealing with an unfinished kitchen has been challenging and not in a fun way.  It is going to look nice, but at the moment it feels like I would rather we had just left it alone.  But I realized that suffering during a home renovation is a 1st world problem - or a 1st world self inflicted suffering, that is - it is difficult to live through, but 2nd and 3rd world people don't do kitchen renovations and generally their suffering doesn't end with a new backsplash, extra pantry storage, and properly wired outlets.

The Whole Internet

Sometimes Rob says, "I've seen the whole internet."  And often I feel the same way.  Even though there is way more than I could ever process available, sometimes I feel like I've seen and read everything I'm interested in.  Sometimes it isn't that I've found the information I wanted, sometimes it's that I don't want to go through a slideshow to get it, I don't want to read it with a scroll of smutty celebrity stories running alongside the article, I don't want to start reading an article that turns out to be the same information repeated 3 times in different words.  It used to be that I could find interesting mommy blogs, but now they all seem to be perfect how to or advice blogs; all the real-mommy blogs are hidden. 

Rob's birthday was last week.  We usually go out for sushi on his birthday, but this year, we made dinner at home.  Annalise and I have made several batches of California rolls now and we made a pile of them:

We were going to make sushi too, but chickened out - the main reason being, neither Rob nor I felt confident that we would be able to know with certainty if the fish we bought was fresh enough to be eaten raw.  We got some tuna steaks instead and he seared them so that they were raw inside.

We made a sushi cake instead:

 Natalie lost her first tooth!

And I love this drawing Irene made this week:

She said the face behind the lady is her pet.

Annalise's Birthday

Annalise turned 10 this week! 

She asked me if she could decorate her own cake.  She wanted me to frost it neon orange and write in green Happy Birthday Annalise, so I'm not sure I got quite neon, but definitely orange!  I made pink, purple and blue and set her up with icing tips.  She did not have a specific design in mind, but had fun experimenting :) 

Annalise is a sweet girl who makes friends easily.  She is a big help around the house and a great big sister.  So thankful for 10 years with this girlie! 

Caleb's Birthday

Caleb turned 12 last Saturday and while he still loves trains, fishing, football, rockets, and firecrackers, he has a new passion - airplanes.  He requested I make him a 747 cake for his birthday. 

I was happy with everything except the windshield.  I couldn't get it quite right.  The little windows are mini chocolate chips.  The wings are made of cardboard and covered with fondant.  The engines are rice crispy treat, but somehow mixed with fondant they were way too icky sweet, so even though they are edible, no one ate them.

The girls and I found some relighting candles, so he got to blow the candles out several times.

12.  Of course we are asking ourselves how those 12 years have passed so quickly, they have passed busily and sweetly and Caleb is a thoughtful and helpful (and opinionated) boy and we are so thankful for him.

Irene's Birthday

Irene turned 3 on Friday.  She has seemed much less baby-like lately and I guess that is why!  Three is not really a baby anymore.

I asked her what she wanted special for breakfast and she said firmly, "Oatmeal."

We dropped by Publix and she had a ride in the car-cart - something she loves!

The big girls were at a musical theater camp last week, so Caleb and I took her to the zoo for the morning. 

This would have scared her a year ago!

And she requested a cake with a barn and horses.  The barn is made of graham crackers.  The walls really turned out nice, but the roof was sort of a mess.  (BTW, I discovered you can paint graham crackers with food coloring mixed with any sort of extract.)

Natalie's Birthday

Natalie turned 7 yesterday!

Some friends were moving and gave us their rain check tickets to a water park in Broward County.  I had never heard of it before.  It is on a county park and had two water playgrounds (one for bitsy kids), a lazy river, and a set of twisty water slides.  So it was not a super intense water park, but it was a fun day.

A few days before her birthday, Natalie designed her cake, she and I both drew parts:

The result:

Shopkins t-shirt joy!

She had a delightful day :)

I'm Over It

My birthday, that is!  And the hill...

by Natalie

Up until my actual birthday, I tried to relish the fact I was still in my 30s.  Then the day came and went and nothing really changed.  So I don't know what to say about turning 40 except that I think that whole "40 is the new 30" thing is a joke. But it isn't all bad.  No one drew me any pictures like the one above when I turned 30!  My son didn't make me pancakes for breakfast when I turned 30 - but he did this year!

The big girls made the cake with a little help from me.  We had a moist vanilla chocolate chip bundt cake.  The kids couldn't agree on how to decorate it, so they decided to section it in 4ths and each decorate their area with toys.  They went a little overboard!

No pesky candles to blow out!

Anyone else think Caleb's 4th looks a little generous!

All in all, my birthday was a pleasant day :)

Caleb Turned 11

I kind of missed Caleb's birthday on my blog - we were not on vacation on his birthday (we left the next day), and he wanted to celebrate in North Carolina.  After a couple of different cake ideas were thrown around, we BOUGHT A CAKE!  This is his first birthday cake that I did not make!  He requested we write Happy Birthday Bassmaster :)  He is quite the fisherman!

They got in a little trout fishing while we were in North Carolina.  Although the river was low and not much hope was offered by the locals, he and Rob caught 3 nice sized trout.  We froze them and brought them home to eat.

Today he told me he thought his voice was changing, I smiled, but I think he has a cold! (Which has changed his voice.)  He does not have a very high voice to begin with.

Panda Party Games

Some of the finer details of Annalise's birthday party were decided before any planning was done. One thing she wanted to do was an egg and spoon race. We panda-fied it by making the eggs "baby pandas".

Old sharpie marker and egg shell don't mix!

We played it two ways - no one broke it carrying the spoon, so in the 2nd round they held the spoon in their mouths.

Much messier!

After the game, Irene enjoyed helping with the clean up!

So it sounds a little gruesome, but life for a newborn panda is pretty uncertain.  They are very tiny and their mortality rate is about 40%.  That is about the percentage of eggs that were broken too - at least during the game!  By the time, I wrangled the kids off to the next game, there were no unbroken eggs.

The other games were:

Steal the bamboo (aka Steal the bacon)

Sleeping Pandas (aka make me laugh)

Who has the bamboo (aka the eraser game)

Annalise's Panda Party

Annalise is turning 9 this week and we had a "friend party" last weekend.  She loves pandas and is interested in Asia, so her theme was officially panda, but in reality it was an Asian Fusion!  The fabulous thing about party planning with Annalise is that she has a lot of ideas and we were able to use a lot of them.

For decorations, we took advantage of our exposed trusses and hung homemade paper lanterns and paper umbrellas.  We had some paper umbrellas, but the ones pictured are ones I bought at garage sales - total cost $2 - actually the construction paper for the lanterns was a garage sale find too that I was willing to pay for, but the seller was so eager to be rid of it she insisted I take it for free! 

The puffy balls on a ribbon were Dollar Tree decorations and the wall hangings are mine.  The rose one actually says something in Chinese about birthdays - I was in China on my 24th birthday.

The goodie take-out boxes.

She requested California rolls - we got a big pack of chopsticks too.  I also made chicken nuggets, so some kids ate chicken nuggets with chopsticks!  Also pictured Lychee juice boxes from South Korea and Mandarin Oranges.

Her cake is called "Pandas at the Beach".  She made the pandas out of tootsie rolls (we had an excess of vanilla tootsie rolls from a station event).  The food in the picnic basket is bamboo.  Natalie helped her make some of the details.

We played some games that were tweaked to fit the theme, but I'll post them another time if I can find the time!