Wednesday, October 17, 2012

15 Min Construction Site Birthday Cake Deco


This year Jonas’s third birthday hit right in the middle of family flu season.  Luckily, Jonas was already over the flu.  Unfortunately, my husband wasn’t, I was on antibiotics for strep, and Lukas was in recovery.  

Talk about multi-tasking!  Between bringing my boys to bed and  taking care of my sick husband, I only had a couple of hours to decorate the house, bake and decorate the cake, and get all of the gifts ready for the birthday party.

I originally had big hopes for Jonas’s birthday cake and had planned on spending a lot more time making it really perfect. As a mother, though, I’ve learned that you often have to make compromises, or nothing gets done.  Luckily, my sister-in-law Regina had given me some construction candles (I'm sure Hotwheels would also work) and I was able to rethink the cake and come up with an idea that was extremely quick and still did the trick. I don't know exactly how long I had to decorate this cake, but I'm pretty sure it was under 15 minutes. 

While I was decorating the cake with my hands full of sticky bright frosting (I couldn’t find my decorating tools, so I had to spoon the frosting into a Ziploc bag and cut the corner cut off) I was thinking - Hopefully Lukas will sleep tonight, instead of waking up screaming of an earache like the last few nights.  Hopefully, my husband won’t be out of order more than a day or two.  Hopefully, Jonas won’t wake up either, and I’ll get a good nights sleep, which I desperately needed.  I’d already come to the conclusion that we mothers really don’t have time to get sick and when we do, we have to do our best to just ignore it and keep going. 
  
Somehow, I managed to get it all done and it wasn’t until I had just laid down in bed to sleep that Lukas started crying.  Nonetheless, in the morning, when Jonas woke up, went down the stairs and saw his cake and gifts waiting for him and he smiled that huge it’s my birthday smile, nothing else mattered. 

“Mama, Lukas can have one half of the cake, and I’ll have the other half.” Turning three really is fantastic.   

No comments: