Clearly that was going to be unacceptable this year, so we did everything we could to get it as close to his birthday as possible. The weekend after ended up not working out, but this weekend--Saturday specifically--looked good all around, so we locked it in! The only problem is that this week was my crazy week at work prior to the end of the fiscal year on June 30, and time off was generally frowned upon. I took a half day for the last day of school, and that was all I could really risk. But having the party on Saturday meant that our prep time would be minimal. I set the party time at 3:00 to give us max time that day, but given that our anniversary was Friday and my parents were nice enough to stick around after watching Carter on Friday so we could go out to dinner alone, we didn't have a lot of time Friday night either. But last weekend I did a ton of yard work and some dusting, and over the course of the week Craig did a lot in the yard, too. It was a constant struggle all week to keep the house picked up, especially because of the avalanche of year-end stuff coming home from school. I shopped on Thursday and picked up some final cake decorating stuff on Friday at lunch. I finally did some final bathroom cleaning and vacuuming on Saturday, along with cake decorating, after staying up late enough Friday to get both layers baked and start on early assembly. It was a struggle, but I kept telling myself it's always worth it to have family time!
As for the cake...Originally we were considering a Raptors' jersey, but then when they won the championship I figured, "How often do you get to integrate your team's championship trophy into your cake design?" Usually it's pretty rare (Knighthawks and Golden State Warriors aside), so I started hatching a plan. Of course, Pinterest was absolutely no help this time, so I was really on my own. The plan had a lot of challenges. First, red frosting. Making red frosting is nearly impossible. I did it for Carter's Spider-man cake, but it was nearly impossible and it still looked a little pink. After some Googling, I determined that Super Walmarts stocked cans of red Wilton frosting. Of course, when I went to Walmart on Friday, it took me multiple tries to find it. Not in the grocery baking section, not in the craft section, and not in the cake pan section. I finally found it in the party supply section. Second issue, gold trophy. Aside from playing around with red and yellow food coloring to find the perfect mustard yellowish color, I wasn't sure what to do. But then I found gold sprinkles in bulk at Joann, and found gold "color mist" in stock at Walmart, and figured between those two things we could create a gold trophy. It would be a bit of an artsy take, but Jacob was on board. Issue three, visual interest. I was not going to try to build a trophy out of cake (gluten-free cake isn't trustworthy), or cut the cake (too much waste), or use fondant (just nope), so I wanted to think of something interesting to do with the cake. The sprinkles would help, but when I realized I could bake a small portion to make the ball look round, that worked for me! The end result wasn't quite as attractive as I would have hoped, but Jacob still liked it!
He originally didn't want his age on it (but I wanted it so it was easier to know which year I did it), so we compromised by paying tribute to his favorite players on the back of the cake!
The biggest challenges were the sprinkles and spray being completely impossible to work with. The sprinkles rolled all over the place, and the spray was very hard to aim properly. Too far out and it sprayed too wide and too light, too close and it wasn't even. I also forgot to draw the lines on the ball and net before I did the first round of sprinkles. Eventually I gave up on fixing the rogue sprinkles and spread them all over the cake like confetti. In retrospect at that point I should have taken the shaker top off the sprinkles and just dumped and spread them, but I didn't want to make anything worse and it didn't occur to me until later. Putting them on the ball was nearly impossible. But I did rock getting side-by-side different colors of frosting without doing one color or another as a full crumb coat, so that was cool to figure out.
We ended up with a beautiful day for the party. Around 80 and sunny, with a pleasant breeze. And even better, we finally got the pool to a reasonably swimmable point. It's not really clear, but it's clean and blue and warm. Carter and my mom swam for hours on Friday and the kids had a blast in it yesterday, too. We had a pretty limited crew for various reasons (my dad's family has a lot going on, and the teenage cousins had other plans), but we had a very nice group.
One funny little oddity from the day was that the house two doors down was hosting a wedding! We could just see the ceremony from our yard...
They had a nice tent set up over their patio/deck that looked pretty at night with lights on, and they recently constructed some sort of shed/cabana so maybe that played a part as well. It didn't last too long into the evening, though. But it was funny to see them and hear the applause at the end!
True to this birthday so far, Jacob only had one gift to open. He got some nice cash in his cards, which was good, but I think he was in the mood for real gifts! We tried to explain he's tough to buy for, but whatever. He did get a cool retro Raptors shirt, though!
We had a delicious meal and Jacob was very eager to get to his cake!
Yummy as usual! After cake, the kids swam and the adults enjoyed the pleasant evening. It's amazing how quickly the day goes when you're busy preparing and getting dinner up and running! Everyone left by around 8:00, I think, and then I had about an hour of cleanup (mostly dishes). It was still pretty light out at 9:15, and the boys were all settled in watching a movie, so I ran out to the pool for about 20 minutes of solo swimming. I was afraid it might be too cool, but the water felt good pretty quickly and the bugs took a while to find me. It was so peaceful. Not as many fireflies as usual, but very nice. It was a very busy couple days, so it was nice to get a few minutes to chill--even if every part of my body was completely exhausted! Floating felt good, at least!
We were hoping for a fun family day of some sort today, but that got derailed by the unfortunate discovery of the disappearance of my work laptop. We accidentally left the garage door open last night (since we were focused on the backyard) and I must have accidentally left my laptop on my car floor on Friday (it blends in to the carpet in a dark garage). It was nowhere to be found when I went to do work this afternoon, and I even drove into work to make sure I didn't somehow leave it there. The only other thing that appeared to be disturbed was the change in Craig's van, so it's possible it was just a quick job. Lessens your faith in humanity, doesn't it? It also took forever to hear from one of my bosses, so needless to say, I was not in a great mood today. I'll hopefully feel better after figuring things out a bit more tomorrow. The cops are on it, but most likely it won't amount to anything unless they're stupid enough to pawn it. Sh**.
So, onward to a new week. Apparently my two days at work won't be as productive as planned. Carter starts camp #1 tomorrow, and is super excited to see his bestie. We still have a trip to plan, starting as early as Wednesday, that will culminate in Watertown next weekend for our last lacrosse tournament. Those plans will apparently be a little last-minute...or a lot. We have thoughts, but will probably be relying on Hotwire or Priceline to do hotels as cheap as possible. Probably will be a bit of a disaster, but we'll see! I'm probably most annoyed that a weekend that started out great ended up so crappy. Summer's too short to be grumpy. 😭
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