Her Party

We celebrated Maya's birthday with a party a week after her birthday. She had wanted a firefly party and for all of the kids to come at night and catch fireflies. I told her she had to have a day party. She was also planning a dragonfly party for next year so I convinced her to have a garden-themed party this year to combine both themes. She was thrilled. The kids painted flower pots and then planted marigolds in them, hid bugs and then found bugs throughout the house, played floral shop with a bunch of fake flowers, ate lunch and cake and then ran through the sprinkler and played water hopscotch. Maya declared it a success, and so did Will and I, after we recovered from the party of 10 girls and 1 boy.

The Cake

Maya had very specific instructions about how she wanted the cake to look. They were so specific, in fact, that we made several sketches to ensure we didn't mess up. The final cake didn't quite turn out as the sketches. In fact, to me the cake is quite a mess. But Maya and I worked on it together and had so much fun improvising when it became clear our original plans wouldn't fit on the top of the cake as we had planned. And, when we were finished decorating, Maya took a deep breath in and then said "I love it! This is just how I imagined it would look!" I heard her tell several of her friends at her party that we made the cake "from scratch, no recipe."