Adventures with birthday cakes, bossy mother-in-laws, and babysitters.

As you may know, my baby is turning 1 in a couple of weeks. For the last few years, I've become a little obsessed with throwing awesome birthday parties for the kids; so far we've had trips to the movies, petting zoos, and the children's museum. And when it comes to birthday cakes I always went to the store for that. But for the last birthday we had (Orion's 3rd)  I tried my hand at making a homemade birthday cake. I found a Mickey Mouse head shaped cake pan at Michael's, and thought 'Why not?" Well, my cake didn't turn out perfect, but it looked enough like Mickey Mouse that people knew what I was going for. And it was edible, which was a plus.

This year for Nolan's first birthday, he's having not one, but two parties, one here at home, one during our vacation to San Antonio. For his out of state party, we're going store bought, but for the party at home, I am totally going homemade. I've found some cute designs, but I am having trouble deciding between a few. 



Dino Cake



Blocks



Or Piggy Cupcakes

I know, they look a little ambitious, but they are actually really easy to make.

Speaking of birthday parties, my mother-in-law is giving me and hubs the silent treatment because we wouldn't change the time of LO's party from 12 to 4, so that the whole family could make it (which she didn't ask for until after the invitations had already been sent). I guess in her world people who don't cater to her inconvenient requests are hateful people. Oh well. That's one less drunken in-law I have to deal with. 

Interviewing babysitters for this summer.I've seen three so far, but none that I really had any strong feelings about one way or the other. We'll see. I wish daycare wasn't more than our mortgage.

Now I should probably get my butt off the computer and do something productive like homework, or dishes.