One Thousand Words

SO.

The child I had surgically removed from my body an eon ago is now FOUR.

We decided to celebrate. I invited way more people than our apartment could comfortably hold and decided on a space theme since Niko is super into the idea of aliens and space exploration right now. Or he was. He quickly vetoed that and wanted OMG TRAINS. He’s still into Thomas and decided that Gordon would be his special birthday friend because Gordon is number 4 and Niko is 4. So I bought some Thomas invitations and we were set.

I set the time of the party for 1:00-4:00 because then we wouldn’t have to provide lunch or dinner, but then I went and blew literally $100.00 on snack-type food (crackers, cheese, crudites, dip, hummus). My MIL brought over her Pita (not the puffed up flat bread, but layered phyllo dough and cheese, or cheese and spinach, or meat, etc. If you’ve had spanikopita (note that pita in there) it’s similar to that but in a log or coiled or round) which was A-MAZE-ING.

I had big plans to spend the week before the party deep cleaning and organizing and getting everything awesome so the week OF the party I’d just have to tidy and maintain. Then I got super sick and spent that week horking out brown slime and complaining about how I wished I was dead, so none of that got done. And the house didn’t get fully cleaned. But I kind of stopped caring.

This was one of our decoration inspirations:

I handed the job over to Nesko while I frosted the cake THE MORNING OF THE PARTY because REASONS that were outside of my control. I also made a zillion cookies… a bunch of tiny engines covered in different colored sugars, and also larger cookies in the shape of an engine, coal tender (I put non pareils on top to be “coal”), a coach, and a caboose. Niko loved them and ate them like this: “oh hey train I’M GONNA EAT YOUR COUPLING NOW! nom nom nom NOW I EAT ALL OF YOU!!”

When he was done, it looked like this:

Well, actually, we hung a bit more crepe paper in swags on the front, but didn’t take any photos of that. I wanted more balloons all over the top but the balloons kept falling down. Nesko couldn’t figure out how to get them to stay up. Was our tape bad? Greasy walls? I have no idea.

Here’s the cake!

Gordon is a splendid blue engine with red detail. His number is yellow and outlined in red. So I carried that over to the cake. I was going to do a red circle around the cake but then decided not to risk shaky hands and a lopsided circle so I didn’t. I also didn’t level the cake so that red ruffle is hiding gaps in the frosting between the two layers. Niko said he wanted strawberry cake. This was a lie.

My camera is a piece of junk, a point and shoot that takes FOREVER to actually take the photo once you’ve hit the button, and which takes a long time to recover from taking photos. My friend Waldo, who is a photographer, used it and managed to get some good photos despite the limitations of the tool she was using.

I made 12 chocolate cupcakes, 12 strawberry cupcakes (as requested), and the cake is a layer of chocolate and a layer of strawberry. If I hadn’t been doing the “4″ thing on the cake I would have just made cupcakes. They are way easier to serve and eat then slabs of cake. We also picked up ice cream bars so we didn’t have to deal with dishing out scoops of ice cream, but then forgot about them. Uh. Duh. We currently have 10 strawberry cupcakes left over.

Some of the other kids “helped” Niko open his presents, for varying values of the word “help.” Everything he got was super thoughtful and something he absolutely enjoys. He got a bunch of books which was kind of a problem because he wanted to stop everything and read them. Presents? Who cares about presents? BOOKS.

Leah made this hat for Niko and I’m hoping that if I am really really nice she’ll make one for me too.

It was a really great time. Some friends were able to come in from out of town, we had some pretty good food even though I didn’t really cook anything.

I think next year I might have a party that’s just kids and make some pizza or something, and then have our adult friends come over the next day for some board games and happy birthday wishes and leftover cake. It was just too many people in our house and it got a little over whelming. It was SUCH a great time, though.

Technorati Tags: 4 year old, birthday, child, kid, parenting

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