Birthday Madness
My sweet baby boy is all grown up! He’s 8 today! Old enough to legally be left home alone for short periods of time.
I don’t know where the time has gone, but I can’t really remember what I did before he arrived in our lives. I know I was always longing for something and always felt like I was missing something. I don’t think I’ve felt that way since I’ve had kids. No time to long for more when you’re deep in the trenches.
It has been out-of-control raining for the past week. In a way it is good the pontoon boat party went bust because there’s no way we’re taking kids out on a boat in this weather. The revised plan is at a campground that has a really nice indoor facility. We won’t be able to do the campfire, but supposedly the naturalist has a great program she put together for the kids.
I was freaking the eff out on Friday because I didn’t know what we were going to do to make it cute and special. I still don’t really know what the naturalist is going to do, but I’ve been told to stop worrying.
I made the mistake of looking on Pintrest for ideas and just about came unhinged. I hate Pintrest. They make the efforts of the common man look completely mundane. I was looking at all these camping themed parties, then trying to click around and find some of the printables and recipes and other ideas. Turns out a lot of those parties are completely staged! They are put together by photographers and designers with the specific intent of you going to their site and buying their digital designs. I had no idea, but I ran into that a lot.
I did get some inspiration and I think the party will be ok. Mike made a little mini-tent as a center piece. Instead of goody bags, we’re having a trail mix bar and the kids can fill a bag with stuff that is trail-mixy. My friend is anti-plastic so she has about a million glass jars and she’s loaning me quite a few to use with the trail mix bar. She also has a lot of wooden and stainless steel scoops.
I made my own labels and screwed up on the proportions (they are waaaaaay too big), but oh well. Will a bunch of 7 year olds care?
This is going to be Erik’s smallest party ever. He was just not interested in inviting many people. If I would have known he only had a few people in mind, I would have encouraged him to have a Chuck E. Cheese party or something. We only invited 8 people and that includes Elsa and another little sibling.
Erik had very partcular ideas about his birthday cake. It couldn’t be store bought, of course. We google imaged s’more cakes and came up with a compilation of ideas. We ended up using my base yellow cake recipe and stirring graham cracker crumbs and mini-hershey’s kisses into it. The kisses stuck to the bottom of the pan and the cake turned into a crumbly mess. I made ganache using mini-kisses, but it got messed up and was not thick enough, so when I poured it over the cake it just sunk right in did not cover any sins. I finally talked Erik in to letting me make fluffy white marshmallow icing to cover it all up. Hopefully I don’t mess that up. It goes from luscious to ludicrous in about five seconds flat if you don’t pay attention to your thermometer.
Personally, I am all for going to the bakery and ordering a cake. Erik will not hear of it, so I get to try to be creative without having a single artistic bone in my body.
I guess I better get up and get with it on this cake. Heck, I still need a shower! And we’re supposed to go eat lunch out soon, too.