Eight is Great! (Part 4)

Today was the last hurrah for Malia’s birthday. For lunch, Daniel and I were able to join her for the PTA sponsored Birthday Table at the elementary school. With the introduction of a veggie burger with high enough amounts of pea protein that they are causing allergic reactions in folks with peanut allergies, Carl’s Jr. is off Malia’s safe restaurant list. So Daniel drove out to Apollo Burger instead so that she could still have her traditional nuggets and fries for lunch. They were a bit on the soggy side due to the restaurant being a good fifteen minutes away, but Malia was not bothered. One of the things she has enjoyed the last couple of year is that Acie, one of her best friends, has a just birthday five days before Malia’s so she gets to kind of flaunt the “one friend or your parents can join you at the birthday table” rule and get the best of both worlds.

Happy birthday…again! Not every kid is lucky enough to get four separate celebrations.😜

Eight is Great! (Part 3)

Over the years, I’ve made a lot of boy themed birthday cakes. We’re talking trains, cars, airplanes, superheroes, dinosaurs, outer space, pretty much every typical boy thing. With three sons, it was kind of unavoidable. As such, creating some girly birthday cakes has been super fun. Making this year’s cake was just like one big long play date between me and my baking implements. 😉 And I completely approve of Malia’s flavor choices-vanilla cake with raspberry filling. Yum!

More important than all of that, Malia loved it. She was perfectly pleased with how everything turned out. My mom made fun cakes for me when I was young, and I’m so glad that this is something I can do for my kids. I enjoy it and having a one of a kind cake is one of the ways I can let my kids know that they are one of a kind as well. So happy birthday, Malia! I’m so glad to have another girl to help balance out all the boy stuff in my life!

Eight is Great! (Part 2)

In terms of a birthday party, Malia had very simple desires this year. She wanted to go swimming at the rec center. I was completely on board with that since it meant all I had to do was provide cake, ice cream and supervision. And Kevin ended up being the one to take the kids to the pool which meant that I was able to skip out on supervision and pick up the much calmer clean up duty instead.

Because we have limits on how many 3rd graders we can 1) fit in our car and 2) we can realistically keep an eye on at the pool, we told Malia her invite list was limited to five friends. When the appointed hour arrived, we only ended up with two-my niece Kate and Acie, a friend of Malia’s from school. Luckily for us, Malia was not disappointed in the least. In fact, she told me yesterday that if Kate was the only one who came, she would be just fine with that. Once again, love that my kids are friends with their cousins! One of the perks of having such a small group was that Acie and Kate warmed up to each other very quickly.

Malia wanted her cakes to match the theme of her party, so today’s cupcakes featured teddy grahams hanging out at the beach. They were simple to put together, Malia loved the way they turned out, and they were delicious which is all I can ask from a cupcake!

She had a great time. It was all very low stress. Success for both of us!

Eight is Great! (Part I)

Some birthdays are bigger than others. After the big numero uno, which is generally more important to the parents than the child, the first big one in our family is turning five. Five is big because that is when you are old enough to get your own library card, something all my kids looked forward to. The next big one is eight. Malia hit that number today. This one is big not only because she will be getting baptized in a couple of weeks, but because as of today, she can legally ride in the car without her booster seat. Hurrah! It’s about time! Her plan was to throw the booster on the ground ten times, run over it with the car, throw it on the ground ten more times and then throw it out. Yes, it’s kind of overkill, but seriously, she’s beyond excited to be rid of the thing.

She ended up throwing the booster on the ground about twenty times, each time hoping to break the booster, but let’s face it. The things are designed to withstand a car crash. There’s not much an eight-year-old can do to it in terms of breakage. She did manage to break one of the arms and was pleased about that. It has been a busy day full of festivities so there was time to run over the booster with the car, but she has one more that we can destroy another day. She did, however, do a happy dance after she dropped slightly dented booster in the trash.

To move on to actual birthday news, she took a treat to school to share with her class (white fudge Ding Dongs-she had one after a soccer game last month and loved it). There was a pencil and a small treat from the office, her teacher let her choose something out of their classroom treasure box, and she came home with a gift from one of her friends that was invited to her upcoming birthday party but who will be unable to attend. She came home to discover her birthday balloons, one of which was almost as tall as she is! And although it had nothing to do with her birthday, Malia loves activity days so she was happy to have an activity fall on her birthday.

Around here the birthday child always gets to choose what we eat for dinner, so Malia choose spaghetti (no surprise there) with NO MUSHROOMS. We always add mushrooms because 5/6 of us love them, but since it was her birthday, I left them out. She also wrote a note and stuck it to the fridge to make sure I remembered to give her the “You Are Special Today” plate at dinner time.

After dinner, Kevin’s parents arrived to join us for the remainder of the day’s celebration. They had a variety of small presents for Malia, things that Kev’s mom had discovered as they cleaned out her mother’s house after she passed away a few months ago. There were things like some shells from the middle east, some chopsticks purchased in Okinawa, and several tiny wind up mouse toys. As Malia took each item out of the box, my mother-in-law explained about each item. Malia was mesmerized with the whole thing.

Other presents included Lego with a horse and rider theme from Daniel, Nathan, Kevin and I, a series of books about horses, and a horse and rider toy based on an animated Netflix series that Malia binge watches. As I’m sure you can tell, she is all about the horses right now. 😊

We sang and had a simple vanilla cake with whipped cream and fresh berries. There are fancier cakes planned for later this week, but for today’s celebration, we kept it simple.

I’m very grateful Malia is in our family. Having a girl join my crew definitely changed the dynamics of our household. She is funny and witty. She is confident and clever. She is opinionated and stubborn. She is all girl, but she is tough as well. Having three older brothers has helped shape her, even though none of them understand her current fascination with horses. I just tell them it’s a girl thing. 😉