The Day Before... aka Not So Much Prepared

A few days before Will's birthday party, I saw a great idea on Britney's blog for Batman Day.  Britney &  I were in the same sorority in college & I love checking her blog for great, creative parenting ideas.  When I saw this, I knew it would be a perfect intro to Will's superhero party & would hopefully keep him busy while I baked & prepared.

You can find other cool theme days for preschoolers here.  (Seriously - this stuff is amazing!  We've done the Toy Story Day too & wow!  So fun - make sure you have plenty of color ink in your printer & cardstock paper!  I'm the camping one on our family vacation to Rocky Mountain National Park in a few weeks.  Will loves these & I love that someone else has done the work!  When I was studying to be a teacher, I remember learning from a professor I think that good teachers "steal" - they take ideas from other teachers that are successful and they implement them in their classroom.  I think parenting is kind of the same - we take great ideas from friends and books about disciplining and scheduling and even fun theme days!  (But, it's not really stealing because it's all free on this site!) 

So - Batman Day begins...

(Had I known what kind of day I was going to have, I would never have attempted to cram this in too.)

Will loved the counting games...

But I had anticipated it keeping him busy for awhile... it kept him busy for about 1 minute.  Thankfully, he wanted to do it over and over.

He loved color matching.

He was very good at making patterns.

And at finding letters that I would call out from the kitchen.

He had fun sorting villains and heroes and then writing a little book about good guys and bad guys.

He is becoming really good at tracing lines lately - we do this a lot.

Here he is helping the good guys catch the bad guys with his lines (& his cool new, very expensive, slant board for school!)

There were more activities but my pictures aren't uploading for some reason.  Anyway - it was a lot of fun and really made me want to be a homeschool mom - especially with other moms out there putting together such fun resources!  Thanks to Britney for making me aware of this!

(as a side note - can I just share that when Will met his teacher last week, he told her he had made playdough "T"s the day before on Toy Story Day?  I was so glad that he remembered & applied what we had done... and that it wasn't the kind of day where he just plays all day without any structure....)

The only problem was that I thought these would keep him busier longer... and he worked through them quickly.  And a few other things happened during the morning that I had not counted on for the day before the party.

So, I fought back my independent nature & sent out a desperate text to my mom and grandmother begging for help.  

My mom was able to stop by for a little bit and offer some help...

and my Grammy saved the day by staying for several hours to help me!

I put her to work cutting tiny capes.

And Will has never had so much fun playing ball - seriously they played catch for at least an hour while he giggled non stop!

She read stories

and visited

and cuddled with more books

And I was so thankful...

because it meant I could do the following:

try to clean my house... except my mop pole literally snapped in two so I had to mop Cinderella style the back half of the house.

make cake pops... which after I made from scratch, I take them out of the cooker thing and then turn around to see a pyrex filled with 2 cups of milk - which I left out of the batter.  Ugh - tossed them (& after giving one to Ellie & Great-Grammy to taste test) & had to start all over)

made 5 cakes to make a big homemade superhero cake for Will.  I was ambitious and despite not enjoying baking (love to cook - hate to bake - too exact for me.)  I thought I could pull off a super cool Batman/Spiderman/Superman cake.

I spent all of my precious babies' nap time working hard on icing it.  Apparently, I can not pull this off.
Ok - so here it is just before the crash...

(I can't believe I am showing you pictures - please don't send this to cakewrecks.com.  I recognize that I have zero talent.  I was blinded by love for my boy.)

And then, minutes before I had to wake up two sleeping beauties...

the Batman layer became a Batman cave.

It literally fell apart/caved in...

The destroyed cake:

So I texted a babysitter to save the day & she hurried over  (especially after I texted her a picture of the destruction) and I ran to Dairy Queen and sacrificed my pride at being a supermom who bakes beautiful cakes for her kids' birthdays.

And halfway there, I realized I forgot my purse so I had to turn around and come home & leave again.  I' m sure the sitter thinks I'm a lunatic.

She's right.

Note to self & to any of my friends/family reading this:

Next year & for the rest of my life, when I start fantasizing that I can be some kind of perfect mama who makes beautiful homemade cakes for her kids' birthdays, would you please, please, please, encourage me /force me to BUY a cake - from a professional... in plenty of time before the party!  Think what I could have done if I hadn't been on my feet for 3 hours working on this stupid cake!  Please - there is no shame in buying good, store bought cakes & I will be a better mama when I am not stressed out about the cake. Please, put me in rehab for this or stage an intervention or something next August when I start getting the "I can bake a cake, no problem" bug.
For my sanity, I beg you.

Confession:  Just a few hours before the cake incident, in spite of so many little mishaps throughout the morning, I actually thought to myself, "I am going to pull this off - 2 parties in a week... we're going to make it happen."
So, God did a little lesson in humility.


Coming Soon:  The Superhero Party
Yes, it actually happened & it was perfectly imperfect!