Happy Birthday!

Jen's birthday is this Tuesday, but since she was away this past Friday, Lily and I decided to throw her a surprise party.

I worked on Friday and then came home. Our original plan had been to eat junk food and watch movies all night with Lily (something she ran out and told to mommy as soon as we had it planned, much to my chagrin). Unfortunately, Lily was at the lake all day with her Nana and was out for the night by the time she got home.

She woke up pretty early on Saturday and we watched some cartoons and made a cake. We have a couple different shapes of pans, so I asked Lily which shape cake she wanted to make. "Do you want a square, a rectangle or circle-shaped cake?" She looks at me and smiles mischievously and says "A triangle!" like a smartass.

That wasn't hard to do, though. I was already planning on cutting the cake in half because Lily had said she wanted fruit filling, so I just baked it in the square pan and cut it diagonally. I let it cool, spread the strawberry jelly on top of the one triangle and then put the other one on top of it.

I let her mix up the icing too. I picked up some white icing and split it into four containers and let her mix in the food coloring. I did the actual icing of the cake myself, though she told me where to put each color.

Why, yes, a four year old was supervising this project. Why do you ask?

We waited for Jen to get home, then lit the candles when we saw her pulling in. Lily whispered "Daddy! Quick! Hide!" in that amazingly earnest way kids have. So Jen enters, we hop out and yell "Surprise!" and fun is had by all.

Baby Bear was a guest and not a gift.

I got Jen two books on taking digitial pictures of nature scenes. (These two books, if you care: Digital Wildlife Photography and 100 Ways to take better Nature & Wildlife Photographs) Lily got her a stuffed raccoon that makes a magical sound when you squeeze it and some chocolate. She also made a card all by herself.

Since we started celebrating Jen's birthday three days before the actual event, she asked us if it was going to be like Hanukkah, and we'd be celebrating all week. Sounds good to me. Happy birthday, sweet, and many more!