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The past couple of weeks have been rather crazy around here. I intended to have this post up at the end of last week....but it took me forever to finish it! Another busy couple of weeks at the Atkerson home. Shocking, I know. So....let's back up to last week two weeks...whoops, wrong again....nearly three weeks ago and start there.
The week of February 7th I made a cake for one of the Kindergarten teachers at Eisenhower Elementary School. Brent was in her class....it seems like yesterday that it was his first day of Kindergarten. For details of that exciting event, make sure you read clear to the bottom of today's post...I'll post that wonderful nugget down there. It's rather lengthy and not for the faint-hearted. hehe...If you know me very well you've heard that story and have howled in laughter with me over it. It certainly was memorable! Anyway, here's a picture of the cake that I made for her daughter's 11th birthday.
Happy Birthday Lexi!
This cake is iced with buttercream and then decorated with fondant. The giant pink bow on top is the first fondant bow that I've made like that. I've done simple ribbon bows from fondant on the side of a cake before, but not a big package style bow. I think it turned out pretty cute and I learned a lot about fondant bow making...including some things that I would do differently next time. See those little purple ribbons that look like curling ribbon coming out of it? Those are there to hide the imperfections. I mean, I think they add some nice detail.
Fast forward to the weekend now. Every year I head up the cooking part of our Valentine Banquet. It's a fundraiser for our youth who are wanting to earn some money towards Church Camp in the summer. The high school girls came out to my house to help prepare the food Sunday afternoon. I didn't get too many pictures because I was pretty busy, but I tried to snap a few.
Here are the highlights.
Regardless of what the pictures show, everybody that was there worked hard and was excellent help. I had enough helpers that they had to take turns working! There wasn't enough work to have everyone working all at once most of the time. So, these pictures show the couple of times that I had a chance to pick up my camara...so it was break time for some. :)
Making Dinner Rolls
Taking a quick break
Testing the scales before we weighed out the bread dough
Whipped Cream Icing! YUM!
Ice those cakes girls!
Break time!
Darien really did help. I even let her use a knife! hehe
Zackary came in to make sure the girls were icing the cakes properly.
The menu for the evening was:
Oven Fried Chicken Breast
Baked Potato
Corn
Dinner Salad
Dinner Roll
and choice of:
Pineapple Upside-down Cake
or
Black Forrest Cake
After cooking everything, we loaded it all up and took it to the Senior Center. Charlotte and the some of the Jr. High kids were there getting the tables and salad ready. The kids did alot of the work from filling plates, waiting tables, and helping clean up. It was a really nice evening and Mark and I even played the Newlywed Game....along with Randy and Brenda Ledbetter, and John and Melinda Shipley.
While at the banquet my mom watched the boys for us at our house. She even made cookies with them and they surprised us with a giant heart-shaped chocolate chip cookie when we got home. Aren't these the sweetest little boys you've ever seen??!!
Brent, Mikey, and Zackary
Mikey ended up running a fever that night and having a headache. He stayed home on Monday and Tuesday. I sent him back to school on Wednesday....but Brent stayed home that day with it. I know he wasn't feeling good because I made noodles that day and he's usually under my feet begging for raw noodles; but he was completely uninterested in them that day. He probably should have stayed home Thursday also, but was determined not to miss his first Science Fair. Science is his favorite class. So he "sucked it up" and went to school so he could do the Science Fair in the evening. I however, did not "suck it up"...by Thursday morning the nasty headache virus had hit me. So, I layed around on my heat-pad most of the morning...and did as little as possible the rest of the day. By evening I was feeling a bit better and we all loaded up and went to the Science fair. Here's some pictures of Brent and his partner Timothy and the project that they did.
Brent and Timothy with their project and Participation Certificates.
This is a close-up picture of what they made. It's called a Bristle Bot.
Bristle Bot
It's the head of a toothbrush and a motor from a cell phone (the part that makes it vibrate). They used 3 different toothbrushes with varying bristle types and recorded which bristle type made it go the furthest and why. When you connect the battery, it "walks" all over the place. Very cool. It has to have angled bristles to work...straight bristles brushes just fall over. They really had a good time with it and I'm glad he toughed it out and went to school that day because......
...he found out Friday that he and Timothy won the Parent's Choice Award. Yea Brent! Look at that big cheesy smile!
I LOVE IT! He was on Cloud 9!
I LOVE IT! He was on Cloud 9!
Friday....yea, I love you.
A couple of weird weeks around here with all the cooking and science and sickness. Glad to be done with that! Friday did finally come, and with it, one last cake and a short babysitting job. A friend of mine called to see if I could watch her 2 1/2 year old son for a couple of hours while she went to a meeting. He was so cute and well behaved I hardly even noticed he was here. In fact, I tried to trick her into taking Zackary instead when she came to pick Clay up, but unfortunately she did remember which child belonged to her. While they played I worked on another cake. This cake was for a 1st Birthday.
Here's a picture of the napkin that it was supposed to coordinate with...
...and here's what I came up with.
Of course, every 1-year old needs their own smash cake:
And with that, I found that I had finished yet another week. Where does the time go???
Oh wait, one last thing....you're still wondering about Brent's first day of Kindergarten?? It was a day I will likely remember (in vivid detail) for the rest of my life....and snicker about whenever I think of it. heh
Brent's First Day of Kindergarten
There we were on a sunny day in August of 2007...backing out of our driveway to go to our 15 minute appointment to meet the teacher. And, there also, was a kitten (this doesn't turn out too good...if you're a sensitive type you might want to skip this section) who happened to be sleeping under the car. Use your imagination here....I think you can figure out what happened next. The poor thing didn't just go quickly either...it flopped all over the place traumatizing my son who was in the back seat passed on quickly and peacefully, I'm sure. Brent was in the back seat crying and yelling at me, "Why did you have to run over MY kitty?!!" (suddenly that kitty was his...nevermind that he was too scared to even pick up any of the MANY cats that we had at the time...that one was HIS right then) I was very pregnant with Zackary at the time and just couldn't find the right words. "I'm so sorry son." We sat there for a few minutes trying to calm down and regain some composure...and off we go to the first day of school! We really know how to get off to a good start! By the time we got to town, he had calmed down about the whole situation and we walked into our 15 minute appointment a mere 7 minutes late. We also know how to make GREAT first impressions! By this time Brent was doing much better, and I was trying to act as cool and collected as possible so he would remain calm and try to enjoy his chance to see the classroom before his first full day of school. So, I apologized for our tardiness quietly to the teacher and told her that we had a rough morning and I waited for an opportunity to explain when Brent was not within hearing range. That opportunity came and I snagged it...I leaned in to tell her that "We ran over a kitty on the way out of the driveway" while Brent was busy checking out the room. "Ooooohhh, I'm sorry. Did everything turn out ok?" she replied. At this point I am thinking, "Really, what kind of question is that? It's a 2 pound cat verses a 6,000 pound vehicle....do you really not know the answer to that?" But I said, "uhhh......not really." We talked about other things for a few minutes and then she said something at one point that made me realize that she had thought I said "KID" not "kitty"!!!! WHAT??? No, no, no....kitten! not kid...it wasn't THAT bad of a morning! So, what must she have been thinking of me this whole time?? I ran over a kid on my way to kindergarten orientation, everything didn't turn out ok, and I'm still here (only 7 minutes late), acting all calm and cool?? Really? "Oh, sorry kid, we gotta get to Kindergarten, but don't worry, I'll call 911 for you on the way." Bwahahahaha! It still cracks me up every time I think about it. I can't imagine what she was thinking about us at that time....I also can't beleive that she still ordered a cake from me this week after that amazing introduction to our crazy family over 3 years ago. It may have taken her those three years to get past it. We tried to do better at making a first impression when Mikey started Kindergarten. I'm not sure why, but they assigned him to the other teacher. Hmmmm....probably just coincidence....
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