Cupcakes for Girls Night In

My neighborhood Bunco group is the best EVER. I am so fortunate to live in a neighborhood with such fun, supportive, helpful women who have truly become friends. We always have such a good time when we get together and I know I am lucky to have found them through a flier on a mailbox advertising a Friday Bunco group!

We had a post-Christmas gift exchange. It's hard to know what to buy that anyone would be happy to get. So my contribution was a "gift card" for 2 dozen custom cupcakes, which my friend M won.

She decided she wanted to redeem that for cupcakes for her other Bunco group, which she affectionately dubs "Drunko Bunco" and asked for a fun theme of some kind, totally up to me.

This is what I came up with:

Those are yellow cake with pink buttercream frosting and lime Jello shots on top in miniature martini glasses. I wanted pink ribbon, but forgot to pick some up, so green it was. It was the first time in all my 37 years I had ever made Jello shots. I guess there is a first time for everything!

I hear they were a success. M said they tasted great (both the shots and the cake!) and looked fantastic and that her guests thought they were awesome.

It was fun for me to branch out and do something different. The kid stuff is great, but it's fun to flex my creative cake muscles to extend to grown-up fare as well. I hope I get to do something like that again.

Technology

How cute is it that BabyGirl calls my iphone "The Robot?" With all it's capabilities (and I don't even have the latest and greatest one) she's not too far off.

Awwwwwww

The other day the kids were driving me a little bit crazy. Every other word was "Mommy!" or "Mom!" and they were very demanding, seemed to have forgotten their manners and wanted to hang on me non stop. This mama was DONE and ready for bedtime...their bedtime, that is.

Then StinkyMan gave me this and I remembered just how sweet my children can be:

That is a picture of him and Peanut, playing outside at the park. See how they are holding hands? My heart melted, I took a deep breath and we settled in for a nice relaxed bedtime routine.

Sometimes, when they are driving me crazy, I need to remember it's me as much as it's them and that they ARE great kids and it's all just temporary.

Arts and Crafts Birthday Party

We had Curly's 8th birthday party here on Saturday. I'm blogging about it now, on Tuesday, because, quite frankly, I'm still recovering. Invited were fifteen 7 and 8 year olds. At the last minute, 4 backed out, leaving us with the perfect amount of eleven.

Now let me be perfectly honest: I LOVE planning parties. I love dreaming up theme ideas, and then once we've chosen one I love thinking up cute invitations. I love coming up with party activities and of course I love dreaming up and making the cake.

All that thinking and planning and creating comes with one distinct disadvantage: by the time the party rolls around, I'm a little bit over it.

Nonetheless, I do want to toot my own horn, so first up is the invitations:

I was so pleased with the way these turned out. They were a fair amount of effort but once I was finished I was so glad I did them. (Thanks for helping me with the blurring, Sharon!) I had to:

Pop all the paint colors out. This was easy as the sets were cheapies from the Dollar Tree.

Then I cut out each of the ovals. This was the MOST time consuming part. About 3/4 of the way through I realized it was much quicker if I made a slit with the Xacto knife and then cut with scissors. If you are going to do this, go that route. Trust me.

I had printed the wording on colored paper that mimicked the original paint tray and cut them down to size to fit in the back of the plastic tray, lining the wording up with the middle of the oval. I didn't do anything fancy to stick them down. Scotch Tape was my friend.

I made a little paint splatter page for the back of the "Come Join Us" tag.

Then I put the whole thing together.

And sent them off to school with a very excited Curly.

Side note: People have gotten really, really bad about RSVPing, it seems. However, rather than having the parents call me, I gave my email address and every single parent sent me a message. I wonder if it has to do with how quick and easy it is to dash off an email rather than make a phone call.

And so every girl was coming. What to do AT the party?

Well we settled on painting pictures, making cootie catchers, coloring placemats (thank you Target Dollar Spot)and making aprons. Then the aprons were shipped too late to make it to the party (thanks for nothing, Amazon) and the aprons became T-shirts instead.


And of course, there was the cake. I made the fondant and the big cake on Friday night (one o'clock in the morning is just so late. Blah!) Then I tasked Husband with the job of cutting the cake into a artist's palette shape. Here he is, trying to pretend it's not crumbling like crazy so his wife doesn't crumble like crazy:

I knew I'd like it better if he cut the shape than if I cut the shape. Plus I preferred to have someone else to blame if it looked less like a palette and more like Pac Man. But he did well. (And now you've seen a picture of Husband. Isn't he handsome?)

Then I covered it with the fondant:

That was before I managed to smooth it a little bit better. It was just barely enough fondant and I had to try to lay it on there 3 times before I was successful.

Then I colored some buttercream frosting and spooned it on there to look like paint, utilizing some paint brushes to somewhat mask a couple of fondant imperfections. And Voila! A cake fit for Da Vinci:


We just used plates and napkins in different colors from the Dollar Tree to represent the colors from the invitations and the cake and it all pulled together really nicely. Our favors were these darling wooden frames with 3 little containers of paint each, also from the Target Dollar Spot.

So let's breakdown what this all cost:

$15 in invitations (Just the paint. I had the rest.)
$11 in placemats (I returned the unused ones)
$2 in scrapbook paper for Cootie catchers (Target Dollar Spot)
$12 in T-shirts
$5 in brushes
$10 in fabric paint
$6 in cake supplies
$6 in plates, cups, etc.
$15 in favors

For a grand total of $82 spent.

Not too shabby. Who says you can't do a party on a budget? I think the girls had a good time and Curly declared it a success, which is, after all, the point of all that work.

Next up: Peanut's birthday at the end of this month and StinkyMan's at the end of March. I'm already dreaming themes and schemes.

Eight Years Ago

Eight years ago I was holding the most amazing, beautiful, wonderful baby girl in my arms. She was perfection in a baby blanket. It feels like I blinked once and she is now perfection in peace sign jeans and a "birthday girl" shirt.

Happy Birthday, my Curly. Thank for being a great kid. I love you.

Tough Stuff

"Being 3 is really hard. I make mistakes."

"Everybody makes mistakes, Peanut. It's okay. That's how you learn."

"When I am 4 it will be easy because then I will know everything and I won't have to learn anymore."

"Baby, Mommy and Daddy make mistakes. Everyone does. It's okay to make mistakes. And it's good to keep learning. It helps you become a smart grownup."

"Are you smart?"

"I think so."

"Is Daddy?"

"Yes."

"Do you make mistakes?"

"Yes we do, sometimes."

"When you are 4 you won't make mistakes, Mommy."

"No?"

"No. You won't make mistakes when you are 4 like I am going to be."

"I've already been 4."

"But next time when you are 4."

"When is that going to be?"

"When I am a grown up, you can be 4."

"Deal!"

Birthday

Yesterday StinkyMan was going to the birthday party of one of his best friends in the whole wide world. He was so excited he could hardly stand it. When the gift was bagged and ready I wrote "To Friend. From:" and then he wrote "StinkyMan."

When I went to grab my shoes he decided he wanted to write something extra, so on the other side of the tag, in his very best writing, he wrote "Happy Birthday."

"Mommy! I writed Happy Birthday all by myself!" He was so, so proud of himself.

"Let me see!" I said, equally excited.

And there, in the nicest penmanship a 5 year old boy can manage it said "Happy Birfday."

It was the cutest thing EVER. He wrote it like he says it and that's good enough for me. I told him I was proud. He showed his Daddy. Daddy told him he was proud. No way were we about to burst that bubble!

He is such a sweet boy. I just love that kid.