Internet Uphoria Lost! Bah!

I was mentally writing another post about how much I love the internet and how it makes seemingly simple things like getting a cake for your son's birthday so much easier until I was faced with the flip side... badly implemented great ideas.

So, let's say you are coming down from an all time terrible weekend where you
a) pulled your back throwing 40 lbs of kids into a ball pit, over and over
b) spent the rest of that day in bed
c) woke up on Mothers Day to a wonderful breakfast with your family, showered with love and presents only to crawl back in bed to recover
d) got up to make dinner for parents, only to have it be a crashing failure when your improvisation of the recipe you have and the recipe you remember and wish you had were different enough to cause a terrible meal to be delivered
e) oldest child starts vomiting
f) you start vomiting
g) youngest child starts vomiting
h) saint of a husband spends the night with kids, helping them
i) you spend the next day with kids at home, parents watching them (thank you sooooo much) and much of it in bed, or the bathroom
j) wake up the next morning still feeling terrible and have to cancel an interview that looks quite promising
k) go back to bed for hours
l) watch tv all day and still feel exhausted
m) go to bed only to NOT SLEEP for the majority of the night

Oh, I forgot the part where we figured it was the beautifully made and wonderfully tasting home made quiche that my husband served for Mother's Day breakfast was the suspected toxic food for much of this time. Happily, this has been rethought and it seems to be a store bought lasagna is more likely. Can I add that none of this was Ryan's fault?

So, here I sit, looking for something easy to make this upcoming birthday special with as little effort on my part as possible.
In comes Ben and Jerry's.
There is a scoop shop less than a mile from the house we are staying at the beach. I went to their web site and was pleased to find that they have lots of information about their shop and an INTERACTIVE CAKE CREATOR!!! All my Internet loving molecules went into overdrive.
Choose the size, the flavors of ice cream (P likes Vanilla with Heath Bar, I feel sure), the filling, the icing, the sprinkles, the writing on the top! So easy! Enter your name and address, email and phone and presto!

Waiting

Waiting

and then a weird blank popup with a helpful x to close it. That's it.

So, I'll call them later and see if they have 6 orders for a birthday cake for P or none at all.

Star Wars Birthday Success!

J turns 6 tomorrow (hard to believe) and we had his birthday party on Sunday. It was a weird Austin-in-winter day where it looked like rain but only sprinkled a few times, while being over 70 degrees so we had to have the AC on in the house...

We got a moonwalk with a slide in it as the main form of entertainment. Happily the house has a great side yard that accomodated the giant blow up structure nicely. Only one piece of drama: the installer came right as we were finishing cleaning up the yard and set it up. It had two blowers so we ran one extention cord into the living room (front of the house) and the second to the back porch. Ryan was out watching J and P jump before everyone arrived. We had agreed to have some "quiet time" before everyone got there, so they were coming in. Ryan comes into the house and I see the house deflating...

"Oh, you unplugged it until everyone gets here?"

"What do you mean?"

Yells from the back yard "Mom, Dad, Help!"

We had blown the circuit breaker with the kids in it!
They were rescued, we moved one extention cord and we were fine for the rest of the day.

One nice moment in the whole party prep process... J actually pitched in. He began the process with a very self-involved attitude about how he didn't have to help, but we had a chat about how it's a lot of work to get ready to have a great time, and then he was on board. He gathered all the laundry baskets and helped sweep the floors, all without a word of complaint (miracle!).

The other big hit was the cake. It was a bit of effort on my part, but it was all worth it when J walked around the whole party telling everyone what a wonderful job I had done and how he thought it was "the best cake Mom has ever made". It's nice to see him grow into more adult emotions.

As we like to say "May the Fork be with you... use the Fork!"