Can't Stop Baking Cakes!

So after all these October birthdays, Dan asks me, how could you be making ANOTHER cake? I think I kind of have my technique down by the end of the month. So check the awesome awesome cake I made for our church's fall festival at ECC. It was the first cake to be taken from the cake walk!

Minecraft Cake Baking Lies

 

I am sorry to any of my faithful readers that I have not blogged in so long. Yes, to all 3 of you...you have my apologies. It is October and  3 out of my 4 kids have birthdays.
As practicing attachment parenting to older kids, a topic that I so try to explore and define. I believe that just because we cannot breastfeed, wear them in a sling, or co-sleep, with our big kids does not mean we cannot be attached parents! 

I think this month, I came closer to the definition of APing older kids while celebrating their birthdays. Of course lots of hugs, kissing them goodnight, helping with homework and stuff like that is all part of it. However this month, a month of celebrations, I  showed my kids that I respect what they are interested in and helped them to celebrate, not just their birth, but celebrate who they are! On October 5, my Indigo turned 2. We had her party at Cool Beans, which is a really cool place to have a party for a toddler. As far as attachment parenting, she is still my baby and still very easy to practice APing as she is still nursing like all day and we cosleep.  But in spirit of my point here in respecting and celebrating who our kids are as a way of keeping the attachment parenting frame of mind, I accomplished with her dress!

We already know that she is not the frilly princess girl that Madelyn is. I didn't dress her in a taffeta flowery pink dress for her party like Madi always wore. No, I respected who she was and she wore a simple deep purple velour Hanna dress from Once Upon a Child with funky leggings from Clothes Pony that her Godmother Susie got for her.

 

On October 18, my second son, Jack turned 10. Do I wish he was not completely obsessed with the xBox game, Minecraft? Yes I would like his main interests to be something a little more productive, but I love Jack for who he is. He absolutely loooves this game called Minecraft, a video game where you build worlds and is chracterized by the entire game being made up of blocks and huge pixels. I would have loved to bake him a cake with sports or footballs on it, no one really wants to have their son be obsessed with a video game, but it is about JACK, not me.  He wanted so much for his party to be Minecraft inspired. His party was a Loveland Laser Tag Fun Center and if you've ever had a party at a commercial location, you would know that you must bring a cake that is commercially prepared. I totally broke the rules to be sure my son had the Minecraft cake he wanted. I was going to pass my homemade Minecraft cake as professional!
I bought a cake box from Michael's and a cake bottom board from King Soopers. I didn't think covering a cut box with tin foil would pass as professional, nor would a plate from home. My plan was to print out a fake Whole Foods or King Soopers logo and barcode onto a label on my home printer and stick it on the box. I had a bit of luck because when I purchased the cake board from King Sooper, she printed out a barcode label with the KS logo and didn't stick it on anything. So there it was! A real King Sooper label ready to stick on my cake box! It said 28 cents on it, as that was the price of the cardboard cake board, but hopefully the staff at the laser tag place wouldn't be looking that close!
Here's my son's Minecraft themed cake encorporating the spirit of the giant pixel game! I don't think King Sooper could have or would have made a cake like this...

Each "pixel" was put on indiviually. If you know the game, you would really appreciate this game. Unless you were my son, Jack. "Cool cake, Mom", he said after about 5 hours of applying pixels and being sure they were the exact same colors as the game. God bless Jack's best friend, Aidan; he thought the cake was the coolest thing ever and really made me feel good. he's such a sweetie! If it weren't for Aidan, I might have resigned to never try so hard again!
However, I did get some more complements on the cake at the party although I could not accept them. You see, the manager of Loveland Laser Tag happened to be a big Minecraft fan. "Where did you get this cake?" Hmmmmm.