Party Prep

Troy’s birthday party is tomorrow, and our house is in full panic mode. My wife’s extravagant ideas for the party, and her unfortunate timing of leaving it all until the day before, have left us in a really bad place. So my mother-in-law has been in the kitchen all day making all kinds of desserts and cakes. My wife focused on the front entryway decorations; which consisted of balloon towers, a month-by-month picture banner of Troy, and a gigantic “Once Upon a Time” on the wall. And me? Well I was everywhere! I cleaned up the outside patio, blew up balloons for my wife, stuck the giant letters on the wall, stacked food on plates for my mother-in-law as it came out of the oven, cleaned the house, assembled a ball pit, made custom bookmarks to give away as party favors, and assembled little bags of gummy worms a.k.a. “bookworms.”

It’s two o’clock in the morning, and cake preparations are still going on in the kitchen. My wife’s idea was to make a cake that looked like a stack of disheveled books. Having never attempted to make a cake before, this might not have been the best choice to start with. But she’s determined, despite the fact that videos on the Internet make it look easier than reality is proving to be.