So, last Thursday, I had a rough day at my job.  Which is a euphemistic way of saying I wanted to strangle my children.  I was tired; they were wired....not a good combination.  What I really wanted to do was curl up in bed with a good book.   What I did was take them to Wal-Mart.  Yeah, that was fun.  Abigail ran around pulling things off of shelves, people scowled at me like I should be a better disciplinarian.  I yelled at her.  People looked at me with contempt and her with sympathy, like I should be a kinder mother.  Honestly, I would have avoided the store at all costs that day, but we had to go.  It was the day of Steve's birthday party.  His real birthday was on Wednesday and we had company, so we put off the celebration until Thursday.

Steve usually gets the short end of the celebration stick around here.  His birthday falls very close to Father's Day and invariably, something is going on that weekend, and Father's Day never ends up being the bid deal that it should be.  (Because, I'll say it here for posterity sake:  Steve is an incredible father and I take for granted all the things he does for the girls).  So, I was determined to make his little birthday party at least a little bit special.  He hadn't asked for much...a chicken club pizza and a pound cake for dessert.

Now, my husband is a Pound Cake Purist - no frosting, no fruit topping, no anything.  Me:  well, I believe that anything that tastes delicious can taste even more delicious with chocolate frosting smeared on top!   And, it's really difficult to decorate a pound cake and make it look like a birthday cake without frosting.  So, I solved that problem by making two small pound cakes and decorating one with frosting and leaving the other in its pure state, just for Steve.  Here's the way the frosted one turned out:

Now, you'll just have to trust me that this caked didn't belong on Cake Wrecks  because of my incorrect spelling.  Really, I do know how to spell Birthday and two minutes before I took this picture, the whole word was in tact.  Do you see those little indentions in the chocolate on the right side and just beside the D in Birthday?  Well, if you were a CSI investigator and could figure out how to take finger print indentions from chocolate frosting, I'm pretty sure those indentions would match Abigail's fingerprints!

The girls had fun making Steve a huge birthday card on poster board.  This was actually one of my better ideas.  They spent over an hour decorating this and coloring on it for him....a lot more time than they would have spent on little cards!  That look on Abigail's face in the background is a good example of how our day went   (and, Steve is not actually ninety-backwards three - I'm pretty sure what happened was that Gracie actually wrote thirty-backwards upside down nine upside down on the card, but I'm not exactly sure...we're still working on her number-writing skills!  She did write I Love You all by herself and didn't have to ask about the spelling, but Abigail scribbled over top of it.)

 

The highlight of the whole even for the girls was the party blowers.  I never dreamed they'd have as much fun with them as they did!








The highlight of my evening, though, was when Abigail curled up in my lap just before bedtime and said, "Mama!  You so pwetty!  I love your heart!"  So, even though there were sour moments in my day, it definitely ended on a sweet note!