Nora's Golden Birthday

My Nora turned 10 years old today - on the 10th, which makes this her golden birthday. Why golden? No idea. Did she get any gold? No way! But she did have a fun day...even though we got off to a rocky start.

Well let me backtrack...last night, I baked a cake for Nora to bring to school for her birthday treats. She helped me make it, but had to go to bed before it got frosted. It was one of those cakes with the colorful things inside it...and the only can of frosting I had was chocolate, and I didn't think it went quite right. So I said - don't worry Nora, I'll make some HOMEMADE frosting (how hard could it be?) And she agreed it was a good idea, and gave me her blessing to do it after she went to bed. Bet she won't make THAT mistake again! I love cream cheese icing, so I softened up a block of that, and threw it in the mixer...but then I couldn't find any powdered sugar, I am SURE that I had a whole bag of it in Ohio, but it must not have made the move. I checked every cupboard, and eventually found one of my Flour/Sugar Shakers that was less than half filled with powdered sugar, so threw that in, and mixed it all up with some milk. It wasn't sweet enough, tasted like the fruit dip I have been overdosing on the past week or so, and it was too thick... and then when I went to get the cake out of the bundt pan - a huge chunk came off the top (I let Nora butter the pan, honest!) So anyway, I tried my best, but looking at the cake, I couldn't possibly let Nora take it to school. So I told her in the morning we would have to get ready early and just go pick up some cupcakes from the grocery store for her to take to school. But we didn't get ready quickly enough. As it was, we had to take some bagel & cream cheese sandwiches wrapped in paper towels and eat them on the way to school for breakfast! Not sure if we didn't wake up early enough, or if maybe we just didn't move fast enough. Will try again tomorrow and see if we do any better. I won't have the first-day jitters, and it won't be a birthday. Oh, and to make up for the cake fiasco, we stopped at Costco tonight and picked up a cake there for her to take to school...and it looks MUCH better than the one I made! :) Mine tasted OK, just wasn't quite on the top-10 (or 100) list of cakes that I have ever made!



But after school things got better in a hurry. We survived my first day, I ran into Nora at lunchtime and recess. Didn't see Gina until the end of the day, even though her classroom is right next to mine. Got a little worried about Jack and Carmie who couldn't remember which door to wait outside for me, but we eventually found each other and made a better plan for tomorrow. When we got home, we did homework and then the kids went to the park for a while. We called Grandma to see about meeting us for a birthday dinner...and headed to Red Robin (YUMMM!) Nora got to open all her presents after we ordered and were waiting for our food...she got spoiled rotten by Grandma, of course, and loved the gifts that Jack, Carmie, and Gina had picked out for her. Dinner was yummy and then they brought out the old ice cream sundae (which Nora shared so nicely with her sisters) and sang the birthday song. She was in a hurry to get home at that point, so she could play with all her loot, so we headed back home, after a quick stop at the Costco for the cake I mentioned before!



OK so anyway, it was a good day, all in all. Nora got lots of things she had wanted on her wishlist for a long time. She is still looking forward to more stuff...Russ emailed her a gift certificate to use at Build-a-Bear, and I am letting her pick out some Stampin' Up stuff from the catalog, too. Not too shabby for a golden birthday if you ask me! I'm just glad I got to see all my babies smiling.