Happy Birthday Holden

Holden turned EIGHT years old on Monday! We celebrated over the weekend with a trip to Myakka River State Park to go fishing. He got to invite 5 friends and we took Grammy, JoJo and the Johnson's to help with the fishing poles. We had such a great time...in spite of the fact that no one even had a single bite from a fish. Yes, its true, we took all those kids to a fishing birthday party and no one caught anything! AND, I don't have pictures of the fishing part because someone else took them I haven't downloaded them yet. Believe it or not, it was a really fun day!
Friday we started decorating Holden's cake. He chose to have a dragon cake...because that goes perfectly with the fishing theme, right?? Anyway, I found a picture of one in a magazine and we copied it. IT WAS HUGE! I needed to use a boogie board covered in foil to put it on! It used a doubled cake recipe and 3 batches of rice crispies! It was definitely one of my favorite cakes that I have done! We had been at our church's Bible school (thus the orange t-shirts) and we started when we got home. It took several hours, but everyone (including Grammy and JoJo) helped and it went smoothly and was lots of fun! Riley took pictures to chronicle the monstrous (pun intended) job.
Here, we have assembled all the parts and made all the rice crispies and formed all the parts. The head, neck and tail were rice crispies and the body was the cake...red velvet of course. My kids haven't had any other kind of cake for their birthdays! Because I love it and I also love that I have four reasons to make it each year!!! Can you tell its on the boogie board? How about JoDee's sunburn??? We had spent the afternoon on Thursday at the beach learning to skim board. She used sunscreen and sat under the umbrella and still ended up FRIED!
Frosting got spread on the head and tail and dotted on the rest of the body. I was surprised by how quickly it went!
It was hard to get at all the curves of the neck! I had to sit on the table several times. Notice the war wound from skim boarding on my knee?? Yeah, I might be getting too old for this type of stuff...MIGHT.

Everyone helped out!

Holden LOVED his cake!

He kept calling it a "fire breathing alligator"...he might have been on to something! Without the tongue, it looked a lot like an alligator...at least that was appropriate for the Myakka trip!

After the unsuccessful fishing trip, everyone met back at our house for ice cream and cake. We just couldn't figure out how to get that overgrown cake to the river! Holden chose where the candles were to go, his favorite part! He didn't think about getting them all blown out in one breath though. It wasn't possible! The boys loved cutting into the cake and seeing the red cake inside! Boys will be boys!!

Holden, its been such a fast eight years! You are growing up so fast! You have handled all the curve balls we have thrown at you over the past year and done so well. You have made friends and adjusted so well to living in Florida. You are such a trooper and my favorite toilet cleaner! I love that you are so willing to help me out around the house without complaining! You are so important to our family! You are always making us laugh! I love listening to you play with Alayna in your fantasy world of Narnia or Middle Earth or pretending to be transformers! You have such a good time together and it warms my heart to see you loving her like that! You are so special! I am so thankful that God chose our family as the place for you to grow up. We pray that we will continue to learn all about you and raise you with understanding of the way you should go. We love you very much!