Thursday night, wearing her Happy Birthday hat (for America, if you must know), she decided that she had “waited until the last minute” and needed to whip up something special for the holiday and her buddy O. She grabbed her cookbook, dove to the back of the book “what’s that thing in the back with the list of everything?…ah the index, right” and looked up ice cream which was the main ingredient that she wished to use. There was a recipe for an ice cream cake, and luckily we had everything on hand to make the chocolate cake base. She sifted the flour and cocoa together, getting more of it out of the top of the sifter than in the bowl. The rest of the ingredients followed and the cake was left to cool for the night. Big plans were made for the top, and I ran to the store with her requests.




Yesterday morning we set the ice cream out to soften a bit and then she got to work on the top. Very patriotic, and some marshmallows actually did make it past her mouth and into the stripes. (Not many, but a few.) That afternoon we met up with O and his family and the kids played for a few hours at the pool. After all the rain and storms and wind, the day actually turned out to be very nice. The kids had a blast.
After a fabulous dinner, the kids biked down to the lake at the bottom of the neighborhood and looked for little frogs and dodged mosquitoes. On the way back up the hill it was easy to get distracted by the firework shows all around. O lives near the top of the bluffs, and you can see pretty great distances over the entire region. Large firework shows were going off all over the place, and the horizon was dotted with color. We had our own personal show with some lower key explosives, but the kids enjoyed them just the same. The kids played with sparklers, and giggled and ran for cover when the unpredictable ladybugs whizzed into the air shooting red sparks in all directions.








It was a great way to spend the afternoon and evening, and E was asleep before we got out of the neighborhood. We followed shortly afterward, and slept the kind of sleep that follows good food and conversation and play, sleep deep enough to get us through the loud night of whizzes, bangs and booms that echoed on into the wee hours of the morning. It was a great birthday party all around.