Six-pack Baby!

I was holding Sam the other day and he was only wearing a diaper and was trying to sit up when I noticed his six-pack! Isn't that the funniest thing you've ever seen? Who says fat can't flex?

Cakes, cakes, and more cakes

Okay so let's just say I've been super busy in the kitchen lately. This past week I made 5 birthday cakes. Four of them were in one day! Why, you ask. Because my friends and I have a lot of birthdays really close together.

This one was for Niki's youngest boy. It is obviously a Thomas cake. It is pretty simple looking but it gave me a chance to learn some new skills. I learned how to dye coconut. You literally just rub food coloring in coconut and voila! And I learned how to make piping gel, that pretty see-thru blue stuff in the middle. If you ever need the recipe it is easy to find online or e-mail me.

This is a "spaghetti cake" for a friend's husband. I got the idea from an amazing book called "Hello, Cupcake" I know what you're thinking, "What the heck are the meatballs and sauce made out of?" Drumroll please........Ferrero Rocher (the little chocolate balls in the gold foil) and strawberry jam. Wish I came up with the idea.

This is a Bakugan cake for Niki's other boy. Bakugan are all the rage with little boys these days so I just had to make this for Kason. It's a really simple design but all the little boys at the party thought it was the coolest thing ever.


This is a "Stargate SG-1" cake for my sweet friend Melissa. She is so kind to take care of all 3 of my little animals so James and I can go out every now and then so I wanted to make her a cake she would LOVE. So I asked her sister what her, Melissa's, favorite thing in the whole world was, and she said "Stargate SG-1." So I did some research and I found the symbol in the middle which stands for Earth on the show and the gate design and put them together as my original design. Let's just say she loved it!!!

This cake I spent hours on! It was for my very close friend Stephanie's birthday/going-away party. She, like me, moved here last fall and we became close friends and often joked about "Texas Pride." Texan's are almost annoyingly proud of their state so of course when she left I had to make her a Texas cake. I designed this cake by looking at a picture of the state of Texas then free-hand drawing it on 3 pieces of paper taped together. I then cut out my design and layed it on a 9x13 cake and cut the cake out in 3 jigsaw pieces. Then I frosted it in the traditional Texas flag style. It turned out so much better than even I expected.

Does that make me a bad mom?

Today I had an appointment for Charity and Eliza to go to the doctor for a check-up. So I got up early and got everything ready and showered the girls and put bows in their hair and packed up plenty of toys and went to the appointment. We got their 20 minutes early to fill-out paper work because it was their first time seeing this pediatrician; Sam has been seeing her since birth. After the paper work was done they took us back and we started the questions to find out about their health and speach and all that. Then they got measured and finally the doctor came in. Since the appointment was for 2 children, plus Sam was there, it took an unusually long time. Well shortly after Eliza got her shots, about 80 minutes after arriving at the doctors, Sam coughed! Now for those of you who don't know, Sam got Bronchiolitis a couple months ago so I took him to the doctor and she put him on an asthma inhaler every 4-6 hours for 2 weeks. After about 2 weeks he stopped coughing so I wasn't too convinced the inhaler did much for him. Well about 2 weeks ago he started coughing again and it was just like the first time so I decided to look up Bronchiolitis and come to find out there is a correllation between Bronchiolitis in infants and asthma in children but they don't know which causes which so they treat Bronchiolitis with an inhaler even though studies show that it doesn't necessarily do anything for it. So I decided that rather than taking him in I would take care of it by having a humidifier in his room and having him sleep in the swing so he wasn't flat and pat his back to loosen the mucous. Well all was going well and he seemed to be getting over it. But after being in the doctors office after over an hour he let out one stinkin' cough! And the doctor immediatley turned around and says, "Does he have a cough again?"
"Yes"
"How long has he had it?"
"A week or two"
"I need to check him, let me get his chart"
At this point I am cringing! After listening to him she decides he needs to get back on his inhaler for 2 weeks and take oral steroids twice a day for 5 days and she wants a chest x-ray just to make sure he's okay!!! I was furious! He coughed once! I really don't think it's that big of a deal. My mommy instinct tells me my child is fine! She even said the chest x-ray was just to be safe but yet I still spent over 2 hours at the doctors with 3 children by myself on my husbands birthday and now I have to take Sam to the hospital tomorrow on my birthday to get a chest x-ray that even the doctor said was "just in case." I totally think it's overkill so that if he dies of asthma when he's 50 I can't sue the dang doctor!!! Oh yeh, and the worst part is when I questioned the need for the x-ray she said, "Well he has a history of turning blue." I wanted to scream "B*** S*** he does not have a history of turning blue, he almost sufficated! That has nothing to do with this! He was perfectly healthy when that happened! Anybody would have turned blue if they were breathing into a couch for a few minutes!!!" But I contained myself. So now I feel like if I don't do everything she perscribed I am endangering my sons life.