52 Weeks: Week 30 and Week 31

I'm cheating and combing the last two weeks, but this is my blog and I'm doing this mostly for me so why not. The last 2 weeks have been crazy. It's all been because of things I chose to do, but it's been still crazy busy.

Week 30 saw us taking a quick trip south (3.5 hours south) to visit some friends and meet my new niece.  The visit was great despite a lack of hot water and Cleo discovered some new skills.

 

What's now making me crazy is that she wants to hang like this all the time and will use anything, including the door handles on my, car to do it.

My new niece is very sweet and very tiny and Delia was clearly thrilled to get to hold a tiny baby again. (No pictures though because my brother is definitely of the "I don't post personal photos on the interenet EVER" persausion.) I had a blast taking my 2.5 year old niece to the park with my girls and then wearing her on my back for the walk home. It was the perfect way to chat with her because she was right beside my ear and I could hear every question she asked. ("Auntie, does C.S. go to school?" "Why not? She's not the baby anymore.")

I also won simultaneous best mommy/worst mommy points by taking my girls to the evil golden arches for lunch on the way home. Of course this is the result when I asked them to look at me for a picture to send to their dad at work.

Then we were home and it was time to prepare for D's 6th birthday extravaganza. Of course we ended up doing a little (or way) too much. The problem is not her, it's us. D.G. and I like planning and making things too much and end up spending the whole week before staying up to 11 pm working on birthday related projects. Thanks to the internet, we have access to way too many ideas and so the list of project just keeps growing. Did I need to make a pinata? No, but did am I really proud of it? YES. D.G. built it and I decorated and filled it.
 

Next up marshmallow pops, another collaboration. I dipped them, he did the faces. It is very handy having a husband who can draw when you start all these crazy projects.

Then there was the cake making. After consulting the Lego party experts (i.e. mommy bloggers who are even more ambitious with their children's parties than me), I decided that a Lego cake had to be covered in fondant. Now I have no experience with fondant but I also decided to make the fondant from scratch. Three days before D's actually birthday, I had a moment of panic and decided I needed to practice using fondant. This way I could also use up some extra cake from the "party cake" and there would be something to eat on her birthday. This was the result. Not perfect, but pretty good and the fondant part went well enough that I didn't freak out and order an emergency cake for the party.

Then suddenly it was the end of the week and my first baby, my big girl, incredibly silly and creative child was 6 years old. She makes me so crazy and so proud in the same minute and I love her so much. How can she be 1/3 of the way to 18 already?

 

(Pictures from the party must wait until next week because it was a long weekend here and we had the party on Monday. Also I am exhausted and fighting off strep throat and plan on doing very little this week so I need those pictures to fill up the Week 32 post.)