Birthday Bash

Yesterday was Martin's 26th birthday!!!!! I looked for any grey hairs coming in or teeth falling out, and I found neither, so I guess he's not thaaaaat old. Tee hee hee! To celebrate his barfday we had a little dessert party here at the house with our families and the Aikens. Even Aunt Anna May came! That was a treat. It's fun that she's getting to know the Schap side of the family so now she won't feel weird being invited to family gatherings like the one last night.

I worked all day getting ready for this party. Anja, as usual, took a worthless nap. I cleaned the house a little bit but really spent most of my time making a chocolate cake from a Dorie Greenspan cookbook I stole from my neighbor Tara. This cake took my whole day. When I wasn't actively working on it, it was consuming my thoughts. I made a few easily fixable mistakes, and finally a little after 4:00 (people were coming over at 6:00) I got it into the oven. And only then did I realize that I hadn't greased the cake pans!!! Luckily, this story has a happy ending. It didn't matter. One layer broke so I used it as the bottom. The other layer miraculously came out pretty flawless, and the icing covered any bad blemishes. (It doesn't look so good in this picture, but I promised, it looked edible in real life!) It wasn't in the recipe, but I added a layer of raspberry deliciousness to the middle layer and I think it made the cake even better. Next time I'd like to add it to the top too. If there is a next time... I'm much more of a pie person than a cake person. But anyway, it looked good. We also had some zucchini bread and a hamburger cake that the Aikens brought! I didn't actually get any dessert last night--by choice;I'd had plenty of chocolate throughout my day in the kitchen--so there was one piece of this chocolate cake left that I ate for dessert this morning! And it really WAS good, although it still warm when we cut into it last night and Martin said that made it even better.

Anja was so good while I cooked. I only spent small chunks of time trying (and failing) to get her to sleep, but really for the most part (at least until late in the afternoon) she was happy to play on the kitchen floor and talk to me. Have I mentioned that she is crawling for real now? The thing that did it was the dog's water bowl. Even before she was crawling properly on her hands and knees she would manage to get herself over to that and spill it over onto herself within seconds of Martin or me having our backs turned. She's getting good at crawling too... the other day I went up to check on her while she was napping, and lucky I did--she was crawling right off the end of the bed!

I'm lucky to have a husband who enjoys his baby so much. I realize that there are husbands out there who are less interested in their kids, or who don't go out of their way to do things like spend time alone with them or make fools of themselves for them. But the other morning I was getting out of the shower and I heard all this quacking coming from the kitchen. Martin was playing with Anja's ducks with her. And another day I came out of the bathroom during his vacation and this is how I found them:

They weren't going anywhere, he just felt like wearing her around the house!

Oh, but I'm kind of a bad wife. Last night after the party I went up to put Anja to sleep and I accidentally fell asleep with her. When I woke up I had that strange feeling where you don't know if it's nighttime or morning, and I was very confused. I went downstairs and I'd been sleeping for an hour and Martin had cleaned up everything!!!! On his birthday!!!!!!! Sad face! I felt really bad.

One more picture, of Martin on his way to work this morning carrying the new bag my mom got him for his birthday.