Keeping perspective

" You want WHAT cake??!!"

The pool!!? Seriously?? 

"Oh...ok"

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather something like this....."

I have been desperate to make this cake for months and have been searching in vain for an occasion.

I was hoping I could convince my nine year old daughter that this would be the PERFECT cake for turning 10!  Hmmm... She didn't buy it. 

She really wanted the pool cake.

I was suffering!

" ...and you want LEGO people in it!!? "

Really??

Oh ok.

Are you sure?

Slowly the truth dawned on me. 

Exactly WHO was I making this cake for???

I thought that I had put these simple cakes behind me now that I was capable of oh so much more!!

And besides, I reeeeally wanted to make the pretty cake! It would look SO much better on my blog.

Hmmm....another reality check.

Exactly WHO was I making this cake for?

We weren't technically having a party this year. 

Did I mention that we have four birthdays in three weeks? 

(And still no takers for the pretty cake.)

 We were just going to have a couple of friends over for a play. 

No fuss, no stress and No Mother, don't get all hung up on what the table looks like. 

Fairy bread, homemade lemonade and fruit. Simple.

Sometimes in all of the excitement of my new creative outlet, I lose perspective. 

I forget what is really important, and more specifically, WHO is more important.

The pool cake turned out ok. We ran out of chocolate biscuits to put around the sides because  all of the children huddled around the kitchen bench  insisted on having one each. (Ok, I may have had one too!)

The family said they definitely didn't want cupcakes!!!

(Oh really!?)

I did manage to convince them that my Strawberry bottom cakes were not technically cupcakes because they had no icing.

We made fairy bread together for the first time in years.

My photos aren't really blog worthy. The table isn't anything fancy.

The cake could have been more elaborate. 

But through it all I was taught an important lesson. 

I am a mother. My dear children love ME and don't really care if I have a blog or not. They don't really care if I am creatively fulfilled. They want a mother who loves to make what they want and have a birthday to remember that may not be picture perfect.

They want fairy bread and paper chains, plastic plates and lemonade. 

It's not really that complicated. 

Happy Birthday my Darling. 

Thank you for showing me how to keep perspective. You are a treasure.

 I Love you.

XXX