Birthday Party

We went down to Logan yesterday for Kevin's birthday party. Drew and Owen had been looking forward to it since last Saturday. All week long they would exclaim things like, "We goin' to Kevin's on 'Sataday'!" and "We got a 'berfday' present for Kevin!" and "We makin' a cake for Kevin!"

The party was really fun. I only took a few pictures--I wish I'd gotten more, but oh well. We spent most of the time outside playing on the trampoline (I was jazzed to discover I can still do back flips!), playing basketball and letting our cake digest.

Left: Westley and Owen had a ton of fun jumping on the trampoline. Right: It took Drew a little while to get used to jumping.

Marcus thinks baked potatoes are best enjoyed when eaten like an apple!

I had a lot of fun making Kevin's birthday cake. I sort of borrowed the idea from familyfun.com, and I altered it to fit the occasion. I also altered it to fit my supplies; I had made some cupcakes just for fun a few days earlier, and there was leftover batter--not enough to fill a cupcake pan, so I put it in a bread pan and made a small cake. I decided it was just the right size for a bus, so with a few mini-cupcakes and a lot of frosting, that's what I made.

I originally colored the main part of the cake orange. It was a bit too much. I ended up frosting over it, making the cake extra sugary (and therefore extra delicious). But I was really pleased with how the school bus turned out.

The nickle at the bottom of the picture is for scale.

I wanted to put little stand-up figurines of everyone in our family on the cake. For some reason they don't sell them in stores, so I spent a long time drawing the little bodies, scanning them, tweaking them on the computer, scanning and cropping pictures of everyone, making the faces the right size, printing, cutting, gluing heads onto bodies, and coloring outfits. It probably took a total of five or six hours to do, and one crazy night I stayed up til 3 a.m. But it was a ton of fun to do.

I call this cake "Kevin's Perfect Day." It represents Kevin arriving home from school (which he loves), being greeted by everyone in the family. He loves being surrounded by the entire family (if we have a get-together and not everyone can come, Kevin spends most of the time talking about whoever isn't there). And of course, the cake part represents the perfect food to have at a family gathering.

The final product turned out pretty nicely. Green frosting went much better with the school bus than the rotten salmon color I had on there before. I wish I had planned the layout of the people and the writing a little better, though. Between the people and the bus I wrote "happy 21st birthday," then on the bottom I wrote "we love you." I left plenty of room for all the people, but didn't think I'd have room for anything else so I wrote Kevin's name on the roof of the bus. Turns out after I put the people on there was just enough room for candles (not 21 of them, though; we didn't want to light the people on fire), which I was thinking we might have to skip or put in the ice cream or something. I had so much fun making this cake. I'm already on the quest for cake ideas for Samantha's first birthday, which is only two weeks away!