My baby girl Mary is a baby no more. She'll tell you differently. If you ask her if she's a big girl, she'll insist, "No, I just a baby." But she turned 2 years old last weekend, has been looking and sounding like a 2 year old for quite some time. She even wears a size 3T already.
She refuses to be called a big girl, but she is sweet about it sometimes. She'll give a cheeky smile and say, "No, I just your Teddy Bear, Mommy!" Teddy bears are her latest favorite thing. She loves her hand-me-down pink Care Bear and her miniature classic Pooh. She puts them to sleep with a blankie, and feeds them with her dolly's bottles. We had a Teddy Bear Birthday Party for her, with lots of Teddy Grahams, Gummy Bears, and even a homemade Teddy Bear Birthday Cake. Mary loved the cake, even though it turned out to be my messiest one yet.
Every year, I insist on making my kids' birthday cakes myself. Mostly because I am a glutton for punishment, I guess. There are no less than 4 moms in my Moms Club who make beautiful cakes professionally, who I think about often while I am trying to neatly frost a cake, wondering why doing it myself means so much to me.
My best cake was Mary's 1st birthday cake, a lemon and strawberry butterfly cake. There was no writing involved, which is my downfall. I have always had sloppy handwriting. Then there was the red dye incident of Jimmy's 2nd birthday. I used a preformed firetruck pan and followed the map to frost it using the "star tip" technique, and it really looked pretty good. But . . . I used an entire jar of red frosting dye to color the frosting, and everyone's teeth and lips were dyed red for days. Plus, I didn't know to use the "no-taste" red dye, so the red frosting tasted terrible (which begs the question, why even make the non-no-taste red?). Everyone was trying to get a piece of the black tires instead.
But I do love making my kids' cakes. Maybe it's a nesting instinct that comes out at their birthdays, a desire to be Betty Crocker. (I do use her cake mixes, I can't do it all from SCRATCH!) And it all tastes good to my kids. I guess I could see it as a small example of a general parenting principal. I am not always the mom I aspire to be. I often fall short of the mom I want to be for my kids. But I try, and I don't give up. And I love them. And in the end, I hope they remember how the love tastes, not the frosting.
