Happy Birthday to You!
Somehow, I don’t now how, my older son turned 7 yesterday. I’m sure it was only 2 or 3 months ago that I held my first baby in my arms and decided I’d like to keep him there forever. And surely it was only last week that he was learning to walk and talk. It appears that he is choosing to ignore my pleas to stop growing up so fast!
So, since he wouldn’t let me pretend it wasn’t happening, we celebrated his birthday. I made him a special cake (photo and more about that below). The grandparents came over for a little party and he got way too many presents. You give the grandparents one gift idea and they show up with that plus 5 other ‘little things’ they decided to add. And I had to listen to my husband’s “When I was a kid…” speech about his deprived 1 present for birthdays and 1 present for Christmas childhood. Whatever. I was an only child. I got 2. 
My son is very pleased with his haul. He got the software he’s been asking for (Zoo Tycoon 2 – see my Tycoon post here) along with several books, a Lego set and a Megablok set (F1 racer and a monster truck), a RC car, a geography game – and a share of real stock! He’s firmly planted in front of the computer now. I am informed that he is getting Emporer Penguins for his zoo and he seems pretty excited about it. 
About the cake. He’s been deciding what he wanted on his cake for some time now. I started a bad tradition of ‘fancy’ designs for birthday cakes. They’re not really that fancy because I’m not that good at cake decorating (I want to take a class!!), but I usually do some theme they like. Now something *special* is expected each birthday. So he started out telling me he wanted an airplane. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage that other than pulling the ‘toy airplane on the cake’ trick. Well, then he added that he wanted a runway. So I thought, ok, I’ll put a runway in frosting and put the toy airplane on it. Then he wanted the airplane to have a flag on it. Then he informs me that he wants a specific airplane from his Flight Simulator program. It was at this point that I began searching for a different design I thought I might have a chance at pulling off and which might be cool enough that he’d choose it over the said runway/airplane/flag motif. Well, I finally found it. A space ship! It was going to take some cake carving and a lot of frosting, but I thought it would still be easier than the other option and they made it look pretty simple in the instructions.
Well, I’m not sure it was easier at all, LOL. I think I had some humidity/temperature/too moist cake issues. Something wasn’t right with the frosting. But in the end, I did get it finished. It didn’t turn out as well as I wanted it to and I was getting really frustrated working on it. I had frosting ALL over the kitchen and my hands because my bags kept having ‘issues’. I exploded at my husband, “I can’t get it to look right!”, and my son heard me. He came over, hugged on me, and said, “I don’t think it looks bad. I just want you to try your best, Mommy. I like how it looks! It looks really good!” Hmmm. My ‘baby’ is now more mature than I am at times. How very lowering. And he is obviously learning some coping skills in dealing with his perfectionist mother.
So, since my son was happy with his cake and that’s really all that matters, I’ll be brave enough to share photos. And I’ll try not to point out all the ‘wrong’ things on it. Wow, I totally get that from my grandma! She always did that…you’d sit down to eat and she’d rattle off all that went wrong with the preparation of the meal and how she hoped things would taste ‘right’ and you’d suddenly lose your appetite, LOL. So I won’t do that. And the cake did taste really good!
Here is the cake:
And here it is at ‘lift off’:
So, happy 7th birthday to my son. 
I’m glad it’ll be another whole year before he has another one. At the rate he’s going, he’ll probably be making his own cake next year. 
