cupcakes

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Ten!

My daughter is a decade old. A whole decade. It’s astonishing, how quickly the past ten years have swooped by. 

This was the first year… ever??? at least since her birth???? that we had both sets of grandparents on hand for Carla’s birthday. We all went out to dinner at Carla’s favorite restaurant and then came back to our house for presents and cake. After many months of highly specific requests, Carla asked for a simple birthday cake: vanilla cake with raspberry filling and vanilla buttercream. Because I like to make things difficult on myself pretty, and because Carla didn’t have any specific color scheme in mind, I bought a lot of turquoise decorations and then decorated the cake to match. (I did a kind of watercolor effect with the frosting.) 

For her friends birthday party, we went with a succulents theme. I ordered adorable fondant succulent cupcake toppers and – per her request – made a variety of cupcakes (vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream, vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream, chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream, and chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream) so that no one had to eat chocolate if they didn’t want to.

I took ZERO photos of the party favors, which were mini succulents, or of the décor, which included succulent-printed tablecloths, paper plates, and paper napkins, and color-coordinated balloons. The party itself was pretty meh from my perspective (the entertainment was very mediocre, especially compared to parties we’ve had in the past, but it was still QUITE expensive; the venue itself was dirty to the point of disgusting, and I am so glad I still keep Lysol wipes in my vehicle; and the staff pretty much ignored us except during the “entertainment” portion of the day and except at the end when they came into the sweltering, filthy party room to tell us we had five minutes to get out; one kid’s parents hadn’t even arrived yet, and she seemed a little worried that we would LEAVE HER there omg. I think it was a poor enough experience that I may leave a google review.), but the kids seemed to have fun, so that’s really all that matters.

My newly minted ten-year-old is everything I had ever hoped, in my wildest dreams, a ten-year-old would be. 

This past year – fourth grade – was the best school year Carla has had so far. She loved her teachers, she loved math, she went to school happy each and every day. Some prior years, she’d balk at school or complain of morning stomachaches. Almost none of that this year. 

I text my husband every morning after I drop Carla off at school (this habit originated in her infancy, when I was convinced I would forget her in my car, and has endured for ten years), and my texts from this past school year are mostly some variation on “Carla was in a great mood this morning!” or “Our unapologetically late child is very cheerful this morning!” While getting out the door on time was still sometimes a challenge, I found that our mornings together were some of my favorite hours in the day. Carla likes to chat about all manner of interesting things on our short drive to school. How words were invented, what puberty is like, how difficult it is to imagine herself driving a car. She went through a phase where she stuck her head out the window during our drive and pretended to be a dog. She went through a phase where she would give me the “weather report” by opening her window and smelling the air. She wore all black almost every day (which, to be fair, makes a lot of things very easy), and then at the very end of the school year – no warning at all – started dressing in color again and announced that her favorite color was no longer black but turquoise.

Current Carla is extremely independent. She likes to ride her bike around the neighborhood, visiting neighbors (and their dogs). She loves to swing on the swingset, singing at the top of her lungs. She still loves to craft, making elaborate scenarios for her Barbies and dinosaurs and Calico Critters (all of which she still plays with). She sometimes declines a parent reading to her at bedtime, in favor of reading to herself. (She loves to read! Her favorite books are graphic novels, and she loves books that feature animals as the main characters.) 

And yet she is also such a cuddly, loving kiddo who loves to spend time with her parents. She enjoys playing video games or practicing the guitar with her dad. She loves snuggling with me on the couch, watching TV or a movie or letting me read to her. She still likes to play pretend, she still adores stuffed animals. When we walk together, she still voluntarily holds my hand. 

She is extremely capable. Sometimes she will unload the dishwasher without my asking. She can make tacos and scrambled eggs with little supervision. She picks up the mail for our neighbors when they are out of town.

She is more and more interested in her appearance. She has Very Specific Ideas about what she wants to wear, and when. She has become newly dedicated to keeping her hair nice, and has begun blow drying it with a blow dryer she wheedled her grandmother into buying her. She has begun applying a swipe or two of my mascara and a little blush while I am distracted. She is interested in grown-up undergarments and deodorant, although she doesn’t yet need either. 

She loves to be busy – and thank goodness, because this was our busiest year so far. She had activities every single day of the week – sometimes two a day! She is so musical and can now play two instruments (three, if you count the recorder which I emphatically do not) AND pick out songs on the piano. She has been in two plays. She loves to sing and sings all the time: when she wakes up, in the shower, while she’s supposed to be eating breakfast, in the car, in the backyard, while she’s riding her bike. She loves math (bless her fabulous math teachers) and science and computational thinking. She is agreeable and cheerful and delightful 99% of the time. The other time, she is pure sassafras – but that’s expected and normal. 

During my end-of-year conference with her primary teacher, I learned that all the kids gave each other end-of-year compliments on the last day. Carla’s peers said that she was supportive and enthusiastic and fun to be around. Her teacher said she is a light. And she is a light. She makes everything glow. 

She makes my life so bright. I cannot wait to see what she does next. 

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Pandemic Update; Memorial Day Weekend Meals

I am sad and my foot hurts and I have too many things to do but instead I keep bouncing back and forth between reading awful news articles and researching gun control legislation, so I am going to distract myself by blogging for a few minutes. 

Today as I was putting away the groceries (this is the THIRD trip to the grocery store I have made this week, which is a testament to how important it is to MEAL PLAN in advance because I did not do that this week and now here we are), I came across a giant five-pound bag of sugar that I bought in 2020 during the height of the sugar/flour shortage. I remember spotting it at Costco, alongside enormous industrial sized bags of flour and snapping it up with glee and relief. It has remained in my basement lo these many years. 

Well, my sugar container is looking a bit wan, so I will use the five-pound bag to refill it. My sugar container does not hold five pounds of sugar, though, so… I’m not really sure what to do with the remainder. That’s what gallon-size Ziploc storage bags are for, I suppose.

(The reason I need to refill the sugar container is because I am making cupcakes. They were supposed to do double duty: 1. They were to be dessert for an evening with friends, who were scheduled to come for dinner this weekend. 2. They were to be a special birthday surprise for our neighbor, who has become one of Carla’s favorite people on the planet; when Carla found out it was the neighbor’s birthday, she insisted that we make cupcakes. Anyway, the friends are no longer coming but the neighbor is still having a birthday, so I am still making cupcakes.) 

Pulling out the five-pound bag of sugar did jolt me back, a bit, into those dark days of the early pandemic. Not that the days have gotten a whole lot brighter, in many senses, pandemic and otherwise. But things are different. We no longer buy two jars of pickles a week, for one thing. I still note that we are getting low on paper towels or toilet paper, but I don’t fret. I raised my eyebrows when I saw that cream cheese was in very low supply (and zero of the Philadelphia brand was available), but I didn’t grab more boxes than I need for the cupcake recipe. The peanut butter shelves were near-empty, but that’s because of the Jif recall, not because peanut butter is no longer available. (Our giant two-pack of Jif was in the affected batch; we’d already eaten one entire jar but the other was unopened.) I have been gradually and purposefully whittling down our supply of frozen meat, rather than rushing out to refill it. 

I know things are still far from pre-pandemic “normal.” The note about “only four packages of baby formula per person” at my Target is a glaring example of that fact. But I do worry less. 

On the illness front: I have given Carla a Covid test before school every day this week. She keeps waking up with a sore throat or sniffles (that do seem to magically disappear by the time we leave for school), and I just don’t want to take a chance. Plus, Covid is rampant in her grade, with four and five cases per class as of last week (except in Carla’s class, so far). We are five days out from the end of the school year, and it would be amazing if she could make it the whole way… but that seems increasingly unlikely. 

My family continues to wear masks in public, indoor spaces. I am accustomed to wearing one that I don’t really notice anymore how many people are or aren’t wearing masks. I haven’t been hassled. My husband thinks that our road trip later this summer will take us through a lot of areas where masking will be non-existent, and I wonder if we’ll be hassled then; we’ll see. Carla’s school went mask-optional a long time ago, and we allowed Carla to make her own choice about whether to wear one or not. She enthusiastically chose NOT. We have been urging her, as cases at school and in her grade have crept up, to reconsider, and I think she IS wearing a mask at least some of the time. But it’s hard to know. When you are eight, it is extremely difficult to understand abstract non-immediate consequences. 

We are in the very, very privileged position of not having any underlying health issues ourselves, and not having any immunocompromised people in our household or classroom/work situation to worry about so we are more relaxed than some. I don’t know much about Long Covid, so that does worry me a little. We are of course willing and happy to take stronger measures if necessary – like I am always happy to throw on a mask if a friend is wearing one, and I don’t insist on going out for coffee when it is perfectly acceptable to have coffee at my house. But I feel like we have reached a level of comfort and regularity with how we protect ourselves. More than ever, it feels like contracting Covid is inevitable. We have been so lucky not to have it (or to have had such mild cases it went through us undetected); that luck is bound to run out.  

We are looking at a nice long weekend ahead of us. I finally got some flowers into the flowerpots in my front and back yard, and that makes me feel much better about things. They were looking so dejected and depressed; now they have little bright spots of color. (Except for the pot that has been designated as Carla’s. She went with me to pick out the flowers, and she fell in love with some black petunias. She would have had all our pots full of black flowers if it were up to her. Instead, I bought her a black petunia and gave her her own pot. And then filled up the other flower pots with purple and yellow and pink.)

I am very disappointed that our friends are no longer coming. We haven’t seen them since February, and they are the kind of people whose social calendars fill up months in advance so the next time they can work us in is August. (In fact, we’d originally been scheduled to have them over for dinner in April, but they accidentally double-booked us and had to back out of that; late May was the first available option way back in March when they realized the issue.) So I am disappointed and cranky about that. Especially because I already bought – literally – ten Roma tomatoes so I can make salsa and five avocados so I can make guacamole. I guess my little family will be feasting on salsa and guacamole all weekend. Perhaps I can coax our neighbor to come over for a little birthday fiesta? 

In my planning for the dinner party, I totally forgot about the long weekend. So this morning I planned out our meals on the fly, mid-produce section. In addition to chips, salsa, guacamole, and strawberry cupcakes, here’s what we will be eating:

  • Ground Beef Tacos: Carla squealed with delight when I told her we will be having tacos. Same, Carla. Same.
  • Spinach Salad with Strawberries, Chicken, and Goat Cheese: I will be using regular strawberries this time, not pineberries. Also, I like to use a mix of spinach and arugula because I dislike spinach. Also also, I am going to make my favorite balsamic dressing instead of the raspberry vinaigrette. 
  • Steak Kebabs: This may end up being steaks and veggies instead because my husband has a very interesting aversion to cooking shish kebabs. Even if I am the one who threads the food onto the skewers AND grills the skewers, he is very… hesitant about it. I am choosing to see this quirk as cute.
  • Crispy Slow Cooker Carnitas: This is what I planned to make for our friends. It’s fairly keto-friendly and always delicious.
  • Greek Chicken Chopped Salad: Unfortunately, I could not find any fresh oregano so I will need to go to the grocery store YET AGAIN. I will use that opportunity to buy more berries; I cannot get enough strawberries right now.

Salads and tacos. Sounds pretty great to me.

What are you up to this weekend? If you live in the U.S., are you doing anything special for Memorial Day?

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Obligatory Birthday Party Post

We had Carla’s eighth birthday party at a nature preserve. It took place outside, in an open-walled pavilion. The “entertainment” feature was to be a dinosaur-themed hike. 

Because Carla had requested a dinosaur theme, I bought dinosaur décor. I had first found some pink and purple dinosaur party supplies, but my husband thought they were too babyish, so we went with a more mature dino look. 

Very Mature image from amazon.com

It worked out very well for the venue, which had long picnic tables that I was glad we could cover up with tablecloths.  Although it was quite breezy so my mother-in-law had to spend a lot of time masking-taping the tablecloths to the tables. Bless her.

Note the enormous rock in the foreground that my father-in-law used to help keep the tablecloths in place. Added to the theme.

I set up the gift table with additional snacks – eight-year-olds can build up quite an appetite when they are out hiking. Plus, there is ALWAYS one kid who doesn’t want the cupcakes. So I packed Cheez-Its and the flavored raisins I mentioned recently and mandarin oranges and lots of bottled water. I also made sure we had tons of antibacterial wipes and hand sanitizer; one can never be too careful, but especially during a pandemic. I also brought bug spray and spray sunscreen. I am nothing if not over prepared!

It looks quite sparse, but that’s because I forgot to tell my husband that half of the table would be for gifts.

My mother-in-law was such a HUGE help with the party, especially with the centerpieces. I wanted something to add a little visual interest to the tables. Yes, I know this is ridiculous; the kids don’t care. But * I * care. So I ordered these matching centerpieces, which were dinosaur cutouts that you affix to sticks and arrange artfully into vases or jars. 

This is what I expected them to look like:

image from amazon.com

My mother-in-law, bless her again, suggested the night before the party that we should set up the centerpieces in advance – for ease of carrying, and one less thing to worry about at the party. Thank goodness she did, because I could NOT get them to look right and was despairing. (My husband: “It doesn’t matter. The kids don’t care.”) But my mother-in-law persevered! She clipped greenery from our hedges and flowers from my flower pots and made the centerpieces look, I thought, quite lovely and wild. Did a single child comment on them? No. But I LOVED THEM. 

I am once again irritated that the decorations are one-sided.

I made cupcakes for the party, with colorful mismatched frosting. Per Carla’s request, they were vanilla cupcakes with lemon curd filling and lemon cream cheese frosting. When I ran out of lemon curd, I suggested we bring half plain, half filled, just in case some of her friends didn’t want lemon curd, and she was very amenable to that. 

Because it was SO HOT on the day of the party, I stuck my cupcake carrier into a big insulated bag and put ice packs under and on top of it. This worked very well, even though the cupcake carrier was too big to fit completely inside the bag. Not a single cupcake melted. (Better yet: no one got food poisoning from over-hot cream cheese frosting.) 

In classic me-making-things-as-difficult-as-possible-for-myself, I did not do all the frosting the same. But I rather like how colorful it turned out? I did three colors per frosting bag, trying out different combinations.

As I mentioned, the day of the party was HOT. And thunderstorms were predicted. I bought a book of dinosaur coloring pages – the kind where there’s a list of images to find in the picture – and a bunch of colored pencils, plus a couple of pads of drawing paper, just in case the storm prevented the hike from going through and we need to Do Something Else. Fortunately, it remained sunny and dry (and HOT) for the duration of the party. (It started pouring just as we were driving away, which was so lucky!)

I knew that the nature preserve staff allotted about thirty minutes between when the guests arrived and the hike began, so I brought some crafts to keep the kids busy. I found these dinosaur mask-making kits at Michael’s, and my in-laws helped each kid pick which mask they wanted to make, filled little plastic cups with glue, and distributed Q-tips and glue sticks. The kids seemed to enjoy the project, chatting with each other as they glued eyes and horns and spots to their masks, and making the masks took up the exact right amount of time. 

The hike leader was very sweet and friendly, but she seemed to have underestimated the amount of information kids today know about dinosaurs: every single time she tried to stump them with a question about dinosaurs, at least one child knew the answer. But the kids seemed to enjoy themselves, even if they weren’t learning anything new. It’s a PARTY, right? Not a college lecture series.

One of Carla’s friends told a delightful dinosaur joke: Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? Because the “p” is silent. Carla’s friends thought that was hilarious. 

I sneaked around and applied sunscreen to the kids while the staff member was giving her spiel. I mean, I tried to sneak – obviously I had to ask the kids if they needed sunscreen and then sprayed them with it, so I wasn’t invisible. 

One of the staff members led the kids on a hike through the woods, pointing out birds and turtles and plants. My husband and my father-in-law accompanied the group on the hike, to keep the kids together and watch out for stragglers. The kids collected seashells and answered trivia questions about dinosaurs.

My mother-in-law and I stayed behind to clean up the craft and wipe down the tables in preparation for cupcakes. The craft – which required the kids to peel white covers off of approximately six million tiny pieces – was awful to clean up. The breeze had carried the little peels into every corner of the pavilion, wedging them in between the boards of the benches and planks of the pavilion floor. But I got every last one of them (I hope). We wiped down the tables and then my mother-in-law and I went and sat in the car with the air conditioning blasting. 

That was the worst part of the party: being so hot. I am not a hot weather person and I was a melted candle well before the party began. When our friends dropped off their kids, one tried to hug me. “I’m too sweaty,” I told him. He stepped back and looked me over. “You sure are,” he said. That’s a good feeling. Being visibly, appreciably sweaty. 

After the hike, I herded the children – masked – into the nature center, where they were allowed to use the bathroom. (The nature center was still closed to the public.) They all washed (“washed”) their hands and hurried back to the pavilion. We handed out cupcakes (MANY kids rejected the lemon curd, so I’m glad we had the two options) and lit a candle on Carla’s cupcake and sang her happy birthday. 

These cupcake toppers were one-sided too, but still cute.

Then we handed out favor bags (which I apparently didn’t photograph?) and the kids’ parents collected them. It was a quick two hours but very satisfying. Carla and her friends seemed to have a great time. 

I DO wish we’d had dinosaur wrapping paper, but I can’t buy wrapping paper JUST to fit a theme.

For Carla’s actual birthday – a few days later – I carried on the dinosaur theme. We had one tablecloth remaining, and I added the centerpiece sticks to a vase of flowers, and I ordered a big dinosaur balloon. We always decorate the birthday table the night before, so the birthday girl (or man) sees it first thing when they come into the kitchen in the morning. (This is a tradition leftover from my childhood.)

Carla decided to stay home from camp. With all the birthday excitement, plus her grandparents being around, she’d been going to bed super late. So she wanted to sleep in and relax and I didn’t mind keeping her home. (I especially didn’t mind because her camp group was scheduled to go on a field trip that day, which required packing them all into a bus, during a pandemic, and driving them on a busy freeway. Two MAJOR anxiety points for me.) Carla didn’t mind missing her field trip and we decided to have a Girls’ Day. We put on dresses and makeup and did our hair fancy (she put an ornamental bird on her ponytail). Our first stop was a candy store. I gave Carla $5 and she was allowed to buy anything she wanted. I loved that we had nowhere to be, and absolutely no time pressure (I’d made her cake the day before, because it needed to be refrigerated overnight), so she could look at every single candy option on the shelves and take her time choosing. 

Then we went to a local bakery that sells macarons. I have taken Carla there twice since it opened, and each time, it was closed. But because we went this time so early in the day, it was finally open! The bakery has a little restaurant as well, and one of the tables is a beautiful Cinderella carriage. Because only two tables in the whole place had diners, I let her ask the manager if she could sit at the carriage table and get her picture taken. She wore her mask the whole time, but the photos are still really cute. She also told everyone we met that it was her birthday, and everyone was very charmed by her and wished her many happy returns. We got her a macaron to bring home and I asked what she wanted to do next.

Turns out, she wanted to go to Barnes and Noble and look at toys. (This despite the fact that she had JUST gotten a million new toys from her friends and had a million more family gifts to open later that night.) Fine! We spent a nice long time in the toy section, where she examined every Barbie and LOL and LEGO set and craft set and piece of Harry Potter merchandise in the entire store. Did we look at a single book? No. Again, it was lovely to be able to be as leisurely as possible, and let her take her time and enjoy herself. I took pictures of her holding things she wanted to buy, which I think gives her the same little thrill I get out of putting things I want in online shopping carts.

Then we stopped at a deli to pickup takeout sandwiches and headed home. 

For dinner, she requested homemade tacos. You KNOW I was happy to comply. And then we had raspberry cheesecake for dessert. 

It was a perfectly serviceable cheesecake. The crust was buttery and crunchy and the cheesecake had a good texture (except for the center, which was a little too soft for my taste). I had reserved some of the raspberry puree and we drizzled that over our slices. 

If only the entire theme could have been Sparkly Pink T-Rex. I would have really leaned into that.

Not my most beautiful or favorite cake, by a long shot, but it was what Carla wanted and I think it turned out okay. 

All in all, a satisfying – and surprisingly low-stress (once I secured the venue) – birthday celebration!