Birthday Bonanza

Eli's birthday fell on a Friday this year, which caused us to postpone his celebration to the weekend. I am usually not a fan of this: everyone gets one special day each year to celebrate them, and it should be done on that day. However, since the kids are a little younger and their bedtimes (and those of their friends) fall earlier in the evening, having a party on a weeknight when parents don't return home from work until 6PM or later is difficult.

So today, after a friend's birthday party, baseball try-outs and a nap, we had Eli's 4th Birthday party. He had been requesting a drum set cake for a long time...several months at least. I remember when I first realized he was sticking with the idea: I thought it would be a piece of cake (pun, de pun, pun) because drums are all circles. On my 'to-do' list, the cake prep remained towards the bottom because I wrote it off as 'easy enough'. About two weeks ago I started giving it more thought, and Lehr and I realized some real work may be involved. To simply create 2-D circles in the shape of a drum-set (looking from above) would not be very effective, as the drum heads are not very obvious. More often than not, they are plain white. The idea of 3-D came in, but then Lehr and I remembered that we are no where near the artists or engineers that the Cake Boss employs, and this may be difficult. We planned a few things and then decided to just hope for the best.

Nap time only lasted about 90-minutes due to the craziness of the day, but Lehr and I used 110% of that time baking, cutting, constructing, re-building, icing, re-building, and refrigerating the cake. In the end, it looked enough like a drum set to please Eli, and that's all that mattered!

Eli's friends played on the slip-n-slide with him (we used dish soap this time and it worked like a charm!), mowed the grass, and shot the rockets onto the roof (with help from a few of the dads). I can't believe this party marks the FOURTH birthday party we've had for Eli...crazy.