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It’s been a long weekend. We’d been trying to arrange a time with our great-nephew and the rest of the family to celebrate the nephew’s birthday. We had just picked up the Spider-Man themed cake when Mother Nature chose to intervene. It began snowing like crazy. There was no way we were going to be able to make the two-hour round-trip out to the Olympic Peninsula—where it was snowing even harder—to collect the great-nephew.
We decided to move the family get-together to the following weekend, and then dove into a flurry of Google searches on the best way to freeze a cake. If you’re wondering, yes, you can safely freeze a fully decorated bakery cake. You just need to cover it in a good amount of plastic wrap followed by a layer of foil. Of course, we had the cake totally wrapped for its sojourn into the freezer when hubby asked, “Um, should we have taken the plastic Spider-Man head with glowing eyes off the cake before we wrapped it up?”
So, it was back to Google to see if the lithium battery powering Spider-Man’s glowing eyes would be damaged by freezing temps. Yep, freezing batteries isn’t recommended. We reluctantly unwrapped the cake, took off the head, and then went through repackaging the cake.
The following weekend, the great-nephew had a commitment to attend a friend’s overnight birthday party, and the week after that he got sick. Spider-Man, unfortunately, was going to have to spend another few weeks in the deep freeze.
Finally, three weeks after our originally planned party, everyone was available—and, more importantly, healthy. Pizzas were ordered, gifts were wrapped, and Spider-Man emerged from the freezer for a slow, controlled defrost.
We made the trip to collect the nephew on Saturday morning. Success! The great-nephew’s grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles all showed up for pizza and presents. We saved a few presents to open on Sunday, because that’s the only day the nephew’s two teenage sisters (same mom, different dad) could come to visit. The older of the two girls works at a spa whose biggest client day is Saturday, so it’s all hands on deck for the staff.
Sunday was a carefully timed scheduling ballet. We dropped off the great-nephew with relatives in the morning and then made the two-hour round-trip to pick up the girls. Then it was back to our house to collect the now-defrosted cake. Then off to the relatives’ house to reunite the nephew with his sisters, eat cake, open the remaining presents, and visit.
That afternoon, we took all the kids to Sky Zone, an indoor trampoline park. If you’ve never been, imagine hundreds of kids running, yelling and jumping while music blares in the background and the aroma of “locker room” permeates the atmosphere. No one wears shoes at Sky Zone, so there are piles of kids’ sneakers and crocs “perfuming” the air. Plus, all the kids are sweaty from trampolining, flipping, running, and diving into pits of foam blocks. Goodness knows how many germs are thriving in those pits. Yuck!
After a pretty fun day, we needed to get the kids home because two of them had school on Monday. It’s 3.5 hours to drop off the nephew on the Peninsula, the girls closer to the coast, and then get us back home. En route to the nephew’s house, we stopped for dinner, and that’s when the nephew sheepishly mentioned that he’d left his Apple Watch at Grandma and Papa’s. Seriously?! We had to backtrack to collect the watch, which meant our planned 3.5-hour trip was now going to be an hour longer.
We completed the drop-offs and finally got home at 11 p.m. Hubby gets up at 5:30 a.m. to do his morning workout, so this was a late night for him. But he got up at his usual time and did his thing. I, on the other hand, slept in a bit. We love seeing the kids, but after this hectic weekend, all I could think was “thank goodness it’s Monday.” |
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