The very first cake I ever made

Yep, that's right: I had never baked a non-cheesecake cake before I decided to give it a try for Eve's birthday. I want to say that I've also never decorated a cake until then, but once when I was in 8th grade my mom had baked a kitty cat cake for one of my sister's birthdays and was trying to figure out how to make whiskers on it. I suggested uncooked spaghetti noodles and my mom let me place them on. So does that count as previous cake decorating? Even if the spaghetti whiskers count, I still hadn't ever frosted a cake before. I guess you could see it one of two ways:

1. I love Eve more so I felt like putting more effort into her cake.
2. I love Kylie more and I didn't want to ruin her cake so I ordered them from the grocery store, knowing they would look good.

Which one of those options is it? That's for you to figure out, I'm not telling (HINT: it's neither!). So I baked 3 cake mixes and cut them into shapes to layer. Then I called my mom who told me I needed to put a glaze over the cut edges or they wouldn't frost. So I did that, but I don't think that I did it right. I also made marshmallow fondant; not enough to cover an entire cake, but just enough to add a little something. While I was doing all this, Kylie asked me if I was making brownies since she had never seen me bake a cake before. I thought that was pretty funny.

Thankfully my mom showed up the next day with a couple of tricks up her sleeve on how to frost the cake. She did lots of the actual frosting while I did the fondant part:

This is what the table looked like when we were done:
And the final product:
The birthday girl with her cake:

Here I am bringing Eve her own little miniature cake while carrying a cranky and tired Kylie. We are all wearing tutu's since we had a fun little tutu party:
As you can see: Eve loved her cake. I'm not surprised. This girl loves food and loves making a mess. Kylie on the other hand, simply likes food enough and hates to be a mess, so Kylie was much more dainty and much less messy. Just another example of how different my two girls can be.

I saved these next two pictures for last because while they were taken while Eve was in her chair waiting for her cake, they don't really look like birthday pictures. But these pictures really capture the way Eve really looks in her candid state better than any other pictures I have of her. She is just a real life doll:

Guess who's sick now?

In a previous post I mentioned that Eve was sick-ish. Well she actually slept well last night and woke up in a great mood. I thought "Great. We don't have to go to the doctor after all." That is until I felt how warm Kylie was and realized she had a fever. My girls have been so lucky not to have had much illness so far in their lives. Between the two of them, I have only once had to treat their sickness with something other than tylenol and that was the time Kylie had an ear infection at 6 months (Yes, I know that I've given her lots of medicine for her eczema, but that's something she will always have. I'm talking about sickness incidents). I mean they've had colds and congestion, but never anything more. So Kylie has just been lazing around on the couch all day, sleeping off and on. She loves that couch. I don't blame her, I liked sleeping on it when I was pregnant. So we decided that we should let her spend the night on the couch, so that if either girl wakes up feeling sick, they don't wake the other one up. So tonight is Kylie's first night to ever sleep on a couch. A couple things:

1. That stuffed pig in her picture is her "night night pig." She sleeps with him every night.
2. Since she's been sleeping out in the living room where we can hear her, we've noticed that she's been sleep talking. The last thing she said was: "I need coffee mommy and daddy. Need coffee." Silly girl. We fill her little teacup up with water or milk in the mornings and she has "coffee" with us.
   

I really need to charge my camcorder...

... so I can videotape Eve:

1. Doing the crazy bear crawl that she does when she's in a super hurry. Sometimes babies need to get somewhere really, really fast. Well at least Eve thinks that she needs to. I have never seen anyone crawl as fast as Eve does when she bear crawls, which is when she crawls with her knees off the floor. She can crawl the "normal" way but it's top speed is not good enough for Eve. She loves being chased and if she hears the words "Uh-oh. I'm going to get you" she takes off. She also does it in the middle of diaper changes because she hates getting her diaper changes. My mom, who has always volunteered to change diapers, refuses to change Eve's because she is a challenge to say the least. Here's the bear crawl in action:
2. Walking! If she's not in a hurry (in which case she would be bear crawling), she loves walking around our house. It's those first toddling and cautious steps that are so sweet to watch. She can now go long distances without falling down, although there are still lots of time where she does fall. Since I don't have my camcorder charged, and my camera which I LOVE doesn't take videos, I clicked really fast through one of her steps, so if you put it in a flip book, you could see the step in action :)
   

Kylie likes to "make lines"

No seriously. Those are Kylie's words. "I'm making a line." She loves to line up her blocks, line up pens, line up her little people animals, line up playing cards, lining up whatever... She even likes to draw lines. She will ask me to draw either a happy or sad face (Yep, sometimes she asks for me to draw sad faces and for some reason they make her laugh) and she will draw lines under the face I drew and call the lines "legs". If she draws lines without asking me to draw a face, she calls them "snakes." Silly girl. So here are some pictures of the lines she made with her new alphabet puzzle:

Future tightrope walker? She took a break from her construction to walk back and forth trying to balance on her line.

"Look Mommy! I'm making a circle." Every once in a while, she decides to make a circle instead of a line, which is usually just like her line, just curved.

"Woah! Look a slide!" That's exactly what she said when she saw her masterpiece and I was confused, did she just say a slide?

She pretty much confirmed that she indeed meant a slide because right away she pretended to climb her blocks, saying "climb, climb, climb" and then go down the "slide" (which is when I snapped the picture) saying "wee." Such a great imagination.

11 months old...

... and just as cute as could be!