Lots of running, jumping, and playing. Tired kids in bed early. Can we do one of these every Saturday?
Category: Ellery
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Birthday cake #2
One of the many secrets no one tells you when you have children is how much birthday cake you will be involved with.
You’d think it would be one cake per year, but that would be wrong. Because there’s the cake on their actual birthday. And then the cake on the day of their party. And then, because these things never line up on the same day, you need to make cupcakes for school. That’s three cake related items. I don’t care if you’re baking or buying, that’s just exhausting.
Here is the cake for the birthday party. After all these girlie cakes, I’m ready for a topic that’s a little less, well, PINK.
On a side note, if you ever think about strategically placing edible silver stars on the sides of a cake, stop right now. About ten stars into placing them on the sides of the top tier, I knew I had just signed up for an hour of tedious work. It took me about 15 seconds to sprinkle them on the top of the cake, which was just as effective and didn’t leave me with a big cramp in my hand.
For those of you who have been around for a long time, you might remember that same cake from here. Can you believe I saved those parts for four years? Now up for grabs—any takers?
Anyway, yay! It got the four-year-old stamp of approval.
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Last day as a three-year-old
My friend, Kate D., always takes a picture of their kids the day before their birthday, on the last day they’ll be a certain age. I love this idea, but somehow, in the midst of birthday preparations, I always forget.
Fortunately, Chris snapped this pic of Ellery while I was out shopping for last-minute items.
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Tulips
Whenever I go somewhere with a child (or three) in tow, I try not to be in a hurry. I try to budget in plenty of extra time.
But today I had to get to the grocery store, as people can’t stop talking about this whole Ice-pocalypse business. And this is my afternoon to watch my nephew. And then pick up the older kids from school. Plus, I need to pick up Kendall so Tom and I can go see a talk about conservation planning this evening. By the time it is over, the impending doom of Bad Weather will be upon us.
So grocery shopping? It needed to happen in the next 45 minutes.
Ellery and I hustled in, me scooting her around as quickly as I can. Suddenly, she’s yanking at my sweater, and I manage to peel my eyes away from the produce to see what she wanted.
“Mom, we REALLY need flowers!”
I was a few minutes late gathering my nephew. But she was right. We really did need flowers.
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We are clearly hibernating
I can’t get the kids to leave the house. All they want to do is stay in their pajamas and hang out at home. I suppose this is what happens now that they’re all in school for at least part of the week—they value their time at home. Although their pajamas are getting a bit stinky (we try to change them at least every 24 hours), I’m thrilled they want to be here. I can’t imagine having children who want to be anywhere but home.
Yesterday they built this massive fort in the basement. (Which I really need to document.) Today I set up a whole table of pouring and transferring activities, splooshing water from one container to another. With all that water out, suddenly Neko had the critter container where Leaper the toad spent a good deal of time this summer. With spring on the horizon, she decided she need to clean to cage.
Soon she and Ellery were scrubbing and cleaning. (As promised, they washed and dried all the dishes they used to accomplish this, which was, um, a lot.) Then Neko turned the whole thing into a jellyfish aquarium, drawing on Ziploc bags with Sharpies and filling them full of water. It was eerily lifelike, bobbing around.
By afternoon, Mary Beth and Nancy came to visit, bearing cake pops, which lasted about 4.6 minutes after they walked in the door. (Delicious.)
And that’s not even half of what went down. Someday I’m going to take one day and record every weird thing we do from dawn to dusk. And you will all die from either boredom or exhaustion. But I feel compelled to do it just so my children know why I yawned my way through their childhood.
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Mandatory outside time
The kids have not left the property since Friday. In fact, they really haven’t left the house since then.
I had an all-day training session yesterday, so they had friends come over. Today, Tom had a meeting. I tried to convince the kids to go somewhere, but I couldn’t get anyone moving.
Around 2pm I ordered everyone to put their coats and hats over their pajamas—we were going outside.
For a long time we ended up in the pole barn, leaping over the wide gap between hay bales. Climbing on the tractor. Vitamin D quota for the day—check.
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Things I love: Anthropologie fairy houses
A few weeks back I was doing some shopping. I walked by the window of Anthropologie, and squealed. In full disclosure, since the moment I walked in their doors for the first time, I have loved their store staging. So many amazing ideas out of everyday things. (I wonder if someone has catalogued them all on the web somewhere? Wouldn’t that be exciting!)
Anyway, with fairy houses being rather popular in our house, I especially adored this concept. I chatted up one of the salespeople and discovered that they are constructed out of cardboard boxes—cut, painted and rolled into tree trunks, and then painted again. Simple x-acto cuts create spaces for windows and doors, and snipped and glued balsa wood to craft ladders and frames. Voila! A veritable fairy village.
As I was taking pictures, someone demanded to run back in the store and have her picture taken through the window. (Hint: it was not the salesperson.)
