birthday and trick-or-treating

We had so much fun! Good friends, family, cornhole, cool gifts, yummy pizza, cake, and ice cream. Well, I'll assume the food was good since I didn't have anything that day except for coffee. Busy, busy. I decided to make Landon's cake this year. Oh boy, where do I begin? It was fine for the most part until I realized how difficult it was to make red icing. That was my biggest challenge. We started prepping and mixing. The next thing I knew I had dark pink icing. Well, that wasn't going to work, so we added a ton more red food coloring to get it where it needed to be. Perfect! But, little did I know or care to think about at the time was the more food coloring you put in, the runnier the icing becomes. Great. It wasn't that bad but just enough to make this task difficult, especially being my first cake ever made. Because the icing was soft, the decorations were looking a little sad. They were slowly sliding off of the cake and there wasn't any significant amount of time to refrigerate it before Landon's guests arrived (or before it was time to dig in). Oh, and let's not forget that my kitchen looked like a murder scene.  There was red icing everywhere, and all over everyone.  All in all, I was pretty proud of myself. Another thing, I was only going to put seven candles on and realized that this cake looked extremely bare. So, I tacked on few extra for a nice presentation. Eh, who cares anyway, right?  It's just a cake.  I've also learned that putting letters on with icing tubes and fun little tube caps is not an easy thing to do either. I now have a new found appreciation for cake-makers. The party was a success and now I am just enjoying my new seven-year-old man (*clears throat* and maybe his new toys, too!).  Halloween was a blast!  I love trick-or-treating with my little ones.  It keeps me young.  One of these days I am going to dress up.  I think Landon will get a real kick out of it.  I've just got to convince my husband to do it with me.  After we were finished with our door-to-door fun, we stopped for some of my Sister's chili.  Yum!  It was quite a treat not having anything to eat all day.  I think I secretly rushed my kids around the neighborhood because I was so incredibly hungry.  When we returned home, I was already feeling the pain of Halloween.  Wow, what a fun-filled day.  And wow, what a lot of walking.  Naturally, I was tired but stayed up until 2:30 a.m. because I was so tired.  Don't ya hate that?  I'm going to warn you now, there are a lot of pictures on the slideshow.