Entertaining

Eat

Oh Dear. It’s Sugar Month.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, according to my children: Sugar Month. Yes yes, Halloween is technically one day, but that little detail appears to have escaped my two sugar monsters, who are under the impression that the second those first leaves fall, it’s all-chocolate, all-the-time. (I blame grocery stores; can we PLEASE put those ten-pound snack-size assortment bags on shelves beyond the reach of a four-year-old? …Please?)

Herein lies the problem: When children know that candy is (allegedly) on the menu, they’re not super interested in anything else, and especially not in coming inside because dinner is ready. No, they’re very, very busy hiding on the front porch with the trick-or-treat buckets that they pulled out of storage sometime in August and filled with pilfered munchies, thinking that Mom doesn’t know what they’re up to. (Spoiler: Mom knows everything.) 

Crafts for the Uncrafty

The Tie-Dye Rainbow Birthday Cake

how to make a rainbow birthday cake with fondant

When the birthday girl wants rainbow cake, the birthday girl gets rainbow cake. 

So I guess this is a thing I do now. The make-an-impossibly-fancy-birthday-cake-for-my-child tradition started with the Mermaid Cake (after, of course, a process during which my friend Alisa taught me how to make a cake that did not turn out like this).

Then came the Spooky Ghost Cake, and the Moana Cake, and the Bloodshot Eyeball Cake...and now?

Entertaining

All The Springy Things

April showers, et cetera et cetera

The school I attended up through the sixth grade was technically Protestant - the hint being its name, Trinity - and students were required to attend Chapel each week, but, oddly enough, the student body was predominantly Jewish. So was the student body at Dalton, where I spent the remainder of my grade school years. And so was I, sort of - my dad is Jewish. Except my mom is a lapsed Protestant. And both of them are atheists. So I guess you could say that when it came to holidays, religion didn't exactly play a big role - we essentially cherrypicked the ones that seemed to make sense to us to celebrate, and celebrated those in a way that made sense to us, too.

Easter was never really a big deal in our house; it always came upon me out of nowhere, like an afterthought to Valentine's Day (the Easter Bunny usually delivered my basket of creme eggs in the morning, shortly after my parents had ushered me back into bed; it appears that I wasn't the only one who Easter took by surprise). Once, when I was in fifth grade, a friend of mine took me to an Easter service with her family. I remember being excited to dress up in my favorite plaid skirt, and I remember the kids got to go up on stage to pet a rabbit, but that's about it.


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