You know how it’s so funny when your son brings home a Father’s Day card from school and you notice that he’s drawn a bottle of wine on the shoulder of your shirt?
I’m realizing that I never shared photos from my son’s 6th birthday – which was a couple of weeks ago. So, today, a birthday photo bonanza.
My boy turned six. Amazing, but true.
We decorated his room with balloons, just like we did with my daughter the year before (see here). I had planned on doing something new and original, but the whole cupcake toy search (see here) messed with me and I didn’t have an ounce of originality left. So, balloons it was.
At least I found some balloons specific to the occasion. There’s got to be an extra point or two for that, eh?
He was up and running around, excited by the balloons and the fact the OMG PEOPLE IT’S MY BIRTHDAY, at the crack of dawn. He joined me down in the kitchen for the things that I do before anyone else is generally awake (make coffee, feed cats, make lunch, fill the dog’s water bowl, wander around aimlessly wishing I was still asleep, etc.) and ended up pulling out his markers and writing a little note to his friend which, by the way, I think is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
Then it was off to school. I did the obligatory leave-work-in-the-middle-of-the-day-to-bring-cupcakes-to-school show at lunchtime. I failed to get any photos. Ooops. Bad Mom.
After school/work, we went out to dinner at the restaurant of his choice. We laughed. We cried (not really). It was great.
Then it was home to open presents in our pajamas. (NOTE: I think it’s hilarious that his little belly and belly button are showing through his shirt. These pj’s are way to small for him, but he just can’t quit them.) I’ll try to share a list of the winners and losers in the present department in the coming days… we had some big hits this year and definitely a few duds.
By the way, I love how – in most of the present-opening photos above – you can see that he has chocolate on his cheek from his decadent chocolate brownie dessert-y thing at the restaurant. Because apparently we don’t have time – or the motivation – to wash chocolate off our faces on birthdays. C’est la vie.
Back in the day, if you baked cupcakes for your kid to take to school for his or her birthday, you might have spiced them up with some sprinkles and a candle and then you were the coolest mom ever.
And, then a few years ago, people started with the whole cupcake topper thing and, if you were super cool, you had some sort of a stick with some sort of a medallion sticking out of your cupcakes. And if you were super super cool, you also had a special cardboard wrapper that went around the standard wrapper that complemented your topper.
But then everyone was doing cupcake toppers (including me) and so it was no longer enough. So, people started putting favors on top of the cupcakes. Big plastic rings are particularly big these days, as evidenced by the fact that my kids are coming home regularly from school with big plastic rings. It was FILL IN THE BLANK’s BIRTHDAY TODAY! Yay! And I got a ring because FILL IN THE BLANK’s mom is super cool. Look at my beautiful new ring, Mom!
{And there’s also some sort of sticker on a stick trend going on right now in cupcake world that my son insists is pretty much the coolest thing and the kids with stupendously cool moms send cupcakes with stickers on them. Apparently I am not a stupendously cool mom because I have the faintest idea what he is talking about and I can’t find a photo online that helps me figure it out. Anytime I search for “cupcakes” and “stickers,” I get cupcake stickers. Which is apparently not what I’m looking for. Oh well. Moving on. }
So, the other day when I started talking to my son about what kind of cupcakes he wanted (what color cake, what color frosting), he made sure I understood that there had to be SOMETHING on top of the cupcakes that the kids could take home with them. A sticker (what in God’s name are you talking about?!??!), a ring… something. Because if not, then it wasn’t even worth bringing cupcakes because he would be laughed out of the school cafeteria for having like the least cool mom in town.
Seriously?!?!
So, I starting pondering what to put on the cupcakes. At first, I wanted to do a little Lego minifigure on each one because I thought that would be super cute and fun. I was picturing chocolate cupcakes with red frosting and a classic minifigure standing on top.
But then I priced out what it would cost to buy enough minifigures for 27 cupcakes and quickly decided that was not a workable option. I love my kid and all, but I wasn’t about to spend $100 on toys for the tops of his birthday cupcakes. No way, no how.
So then I hit the party store in town and wandered through the party favor aisle to see if I could find something that tickled my fancy. I almost got a package of gold “coins,” but then came across packages of these little die cast cars for $9.99 each. Sold. I ended up making vanilla cupcakes with green and orange frosting, and set one car on the top of each cupcake. (Even after nearly two years of blogging, I forget to take pictures of these sorts of things so I don’t actually have any photos of these car cupcakes… sorry. Life gets in the way of blogging sometimes, so forgive me.)
They were a big hit at school. After the kids finished up their cupcakes and licked all of the frosting off the bottom of the car, they each had a little working die cast car that they could take home with them (to add to their collection of 15 million other die cast cars, no doubt).
My kid was thrilled. He told me that the cars were the best thing that had ever been brought on top of birthday cupcakes. Ever. Mission accomplished.
But, back to the I Don’t Get It part of this post… well, I don’t get it. What happened to sprinkles and a candle? Believe you me, as a working mom, it’s hard enough to get the cupcakes made. Add figuring out something creative to put on top and then actually going out and buying said creative thing and you’ve nearly sent me over the edge.
And I don’t even want to think about what’s next in this apparently never-ending battle to outdo the other moms in the world of birthday cupcakes. I’m thinking it involves fondant and batteries.
{Links to photos here, here, here, here}