Special Day

Today is Andrew's second birthday. It's hard to believe two years have passed and my little baby is now a toddler walking and talking and doing things for himself. Next stop...potty training. I started out this morning by baking his birthday cake. I do consider myself a pretty good baker and I could have just pulled out a cookbook and done something out of there but in reality, scratch baking and three small children don't go together very well. Yesterday I let Matthew and Carolyn pick out the flavor of the cake and they chose a Funfetti cake (white with sprinkles in it). I got out my stuff and started getting down to business. Andrew and Carolyn were downstairs watching TV so I had a very limited window of time to get this thing put together and in the oven. This particular mix had two sets of directions on it. The top was the regular version and the bottom was the colesterol free version. The big difference was one called for three eggs and the other called for four egg whites. My intention was to do the top one but of course this is me we are taking about. After I got the water and oil added I realized that I had been looking at the wrong directions and added the wrong amount of water. Thankfully, I had not added the eggs so all I had to do was get out my egg separator and add the egg whites. Because it was Monday, I had to take Matthew and Carolyn over to the school for their therapy. I didn't realize I had forgotten Carolyn's backpack until we got there and she got upset when I couldn't hand it to her. Thankfully we only live a few minutes from school so I took Andrew and went back home while Matthew and Carolyn were working. When we finished up there I dropped Carolyn off with her teacher and the rest of us headed home. Matthew's other therapist comes over Monday and Wednesday afternoons so it is always a rush to get back home and clean things up a bit before she arrives. There is only about 15 minutes between when Matthew gets off the bus and we have to head out the door so I usually do a quick lunch and then pick up the mess when we get back home. I will only have to do this a few more weeks since we will be ending Matthew's home therapy. Andrew was pretty tired so he went down for nap fairly quickly so I decided to use my free time and frost and decorate the cake. I had read on the back of the cake mix box that a fun idea was to add a packet of flavored drink mix to your frosting and it would add a nice flavor and color. Great idea!!! I looked in our pantry and found our container of fruit punch mix. The stuff turns red when you add water so I figured what the heck, I'll do red frosting. I happily dumped my drink mix into my bowl of frosting and stirred away. At this point I was reminded of a basic art principle that I should have remembered from my grade school days. Red plus clear water equals red. Red plus white frosting equals...not red. Yes, I found out that no matter how much red mix you put in the frosting does not turn the same color as a glass of fruit punch. I wouldn't exactally call the frosting color pink; I would say more of a light red. Ok, hot pink but it did have little red dots from the drink red mix. Yes, the frosting went on the cake. I had a tube of blue icing and some candy diaosaurs so I went crazy and wrote "Happy Birthday Andrew" and did a nice blue border around the cake and put some of the dinosaurs on there and it looked pretty cute. I don't think Jim was too thrilled about his son having a bright pink cake but it wasn't like I was serving it to all his little friends or anything. After getting the cake done and put away, it was time to pick Carolyn up and go to the doctor for Matthew's ear. It still was icky looking and I was concerned that it was not healing. I just love taking all three kids to a doctor's appointment. Nothing better that small children forced to wait in a tiny little room with nowhere to sit and nothing to occupy them. Thankfully our doctor is a mom so she is quite understanding as to the chaos. The good news is that Matt's ear is healing up but the bad news is that he is done with swimming lessons or even swimming for the next month. He took the news pretty well and I promised him that he could still go to his fitness class. Jim came home and we decided to all go over to the Wellness Center for the evening. Jim talked me into taking the cardio kickboxing class he has been doing on Monday nights. Lots of fun if you are into pain. I just love torture stations. Lots of punching and ducking along with squats and more squats and then throw in a few painful ab exercises and you have a class. We had two different rotations of various "exercises" and by the end I was pretty wiped out. Tomorrow my body will offically let me know just how stupid I was tonight. I do need the extra exercise, the holiday season is upon us and I want to fit into my clothing. We finally got around to cutting the cake and blowing out the candles when we got home. I snapped a few shots of the cake and of Andrew eating it. In a few weeks we will have the family birthday party (with the in-laws) so there will be more fun and excitement. I plan on buying a Dairy Queen Ice Cream Cake for that event.