We celebrated Cecily turning five on the 23rd, which was Wednesday, with a birthday party. So I spent most of Monday and Tuesday preparing for that. She wanted a rainbow party, because when you ask her what her favorite color is, she says, "Rainbow!" Or when we see a rainbow on a shirt or a sign or wherever, she yells, "Look! It's my favorite color!" I find it adorable. So I thought a rainbow party was highly appropriate. I decided that since we don't usually give the girls presents if we throw them a party, that I would make her a rainbow skirt to wear for the party. My little gift to her. For some reason, I never learn, and thought this would be a quick project. 15 hours later, I finally had something that looked very little like I'd imagined, but still quite cute on Cecily. I think she really liked it, since she's worn it again this week already.
I also made rainbow playdoh for the kids to take home as party favors. I wanted to give them 6 small balls, one of each color of the rainbow. I ended up making enough to make 6 rather large balls. But c'est la vie. Instead of using food coloring, I saw online that you could use koolaid to color the playdoh and then it would smell good, too. Sounded awesome to me, so I grabbed some koolaid on my next trip to walmart. But--after I made 6 batches of playdoh and started coloring them, it took me a number of tries to realize that koolaid has this thing about the powder changing colors after it gets wet and the playdoh itself was not wet enough to change the color of the powder. So when I colored the red using tropical punch, it looked purplish red, sort of maroon. And when I added grape to just turn it the rest of the way purple, it turned black. Which is why we have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and black, instead of the traditional purple at the end. After that I had to wet down the koolaid powder in the palm of my hand before squishing it into the playdoh. Some of them I had to add food coloring to as well--the powerful gel kind. (Like yellow--lemonade is still mostly white, even after you get it wet.) My hands were a lovely rainbow of colors that night.
Then came the cake. I made it Wednesday morning because I was up until 1am Tuesday night finishing Cecily's skirt so she could see it and wear it first thing when she woke up on her birthday. I thought I was in trouble because it would take me FOREVER to make, but it actually went pretty quick. The recipe I found online called for 2 white cake mixes and 2 lbs of butter for the frosting. Two pounds of butter? Are you kidding me? That means that cake would cost me like $15 to make myself. No way. But that recipe said to bake the cake in 8-inch cake pans. So I figured if I could find something smaller, I could use only 1 cake mix and 1/2 the butter. I ended up using my bread pans. So I made up the mix, divided it into 6 bowls, and colored each bowl with a crapload of food coloring. This actually took WAY less time than coloring that stupid playdoh. It is hard to knead playdoh enough to get color evenly spread throughout. My hands started cramping at the end. But for the cake, all I had to do was stir it with a spoon. And Cecily was happy to help. (She'd been happy to help with the playdoh, too, but gave up half-way through 1 color.) Then I baked three colors for about 12 minutes, cleaned the pans and baked the other three. I knew the frosting wouldn't need to look amazing, but I worried I'd have to make more than 1 batch anyway since I needed to put icing between each layer and all the way around. But I was able to just scrimp by with one batch. Total win on that. And it looked amazing if I do say so myself. Everyone loved it. And even though it was not gluten free, I had to do a taste test.
Monday, I had to go to the store and get ice cream for the party, but I also had to get some for an ice cream party Emilia was having at school on Tuesday. I'd volunteered to bring a gallon of chocolate. But unfortunately, I could only get the rainbow ice cream Cecily desperately wanted in gallon size, too. And my freezer is FULL of meat, so there was no way I was going to be able to fit 2 full gallons of ice cream in there. I barely fit one. Luckily, I finished grocery shopping just before the girls got out of school and I made Emilia give her chocolate gallon to her teacher a day early. Phew!
Cecily had invited all the kids in her church primary class plus three more, totally 7 kids she'd invited to our house that were five or under. Augh! Fortunately (or unfortunately), parents in our ward are totally up for birthday parties, so all but 1 of them came. That was still 7 four and five year olds all in our house at the same time. And I slightly underestimated their attention spans. So despite making straw rockets, drawing with chalk, going on a rainbow hunt, opening presents, and eating cake and ice cream, we still had 20 minutes where I knew they weren't going to sit still long enough to do another activity and I just let them play with magnets and put on some music. I guess it worked out though. And all the kids were pumped about getting yummy-smelling playdoh to take home.
Thursday, my mom and I worked on family history in the morning, then I had to run to Macey's really quick before Emilia had a play she was putting on with her class at school. I had bought 2 cases of diced green chili's at Macey's caselot sale, but after cooking a few meals with them, the family was like, "Did diced green chili's get a LOT hotter recently?" That's when I realized that the guy helping hand out cases had given me 1 diced green chili case and 1 jalapeno case. And of course I'd been cooking accidentally with the jalapenos. No wonder the kids were complaining my chili was too hot! So I took the leftover case back to Macey's hoping they would let me exchange them despite not being able to find my receipt. When I told them the story, they were happy to let me exchange. So yay! I don't know what I would have done with all those jalapenos.
Emilia's play was really cute. It was called "Double Tied at the Tracks." She was a cook called "Cookie" and the best friend of the two main female leads. It was the perfect roll to get her feet wet in theater. And I think she kinda loved it. She kept saying afterward that she was so so nervous before it started, but then it was fun after the curtain went up. And she did a a great job. Once again, I could tell what she was saying (and I didn't know the lines this time!) and she projected well despite not having a microphone.
Friday was the last day of school and the kids got out at noon. We celebrated by getting sno cones. Emilia had a friend over because she just couldn't imagine not having her around all summer.
Steve and I were able to go to the temple for a date Friday night because Nick and Wilda babysat for us. They watched Emperor's New Grove and "scarfed" a very large bowl of popcorn while we were gone. It was a beautiful warm night but I forgot my phone at home so I wasn't able to get a picture of the temple.
I was supposed to go to a writing conference all day on Saturday. I wasn't looking forward to it because the classes didn't look like things I needed, but I thought I needed the hours to renew my teaching license next month. Well, I figured out on Friday that I was only counting 2 years worth of points and I could actually count 3. So I had plenty of points without going to the conference. I called the conference head and they happily gave me a refund, so I was able to stay home and scrub floors, clean up, take my kids to the splash pad, go to a wedding reception of the son of a good friend, have another good friend and her girls over for dinner, and make dessert for our family party on Monday. It ended up being a wonderful day.
And we have two more days of a long weekend to go, which I am looking forward to, too! I hope everyone has a safe and pleasant Memorial Day weekend. I wish I was home to visit the graves of so many loved ones that have passed on and are buried in Mandan. But I think we'll visit some of Steve's family graves, so that will have to do. Happy Memorial Day!
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