Breanna’s birthday may have been last week but her birthday party is going to be this Saturday, so in between the eight thousand other things, I’ve been slowly preparing for it. Tonight I completed phase one by getting some of the things I absolutely need for tomorrow. That meant going to the grocery store for the ingredients for the two big lasagnas I’ll be making (ground beef, sauce, tomato paste, cottage cheese, a big old block of cheese for grating, sliced olives (yes, olives), and vegetables) and the stuff I need for the cake.

I’m thinking of doing a Caillou cake since Breanna loves that whiney little twit Caillou very much. It’s not like it would be hard – bake the two round layers, stack them, tint the white icing with a few drops of red to make it Caillou’s peach-pink skin tone, and then use some of the tube icing I bought to draw the outline and the facial features. I mean, he’s not exactly a complex character to draw, it’s not like trying to freehand draw Dora or Uniqua with icing. We’ll see. My back up is always the ladybug or butterfly cake, but Caillou would be something different.

I really wanted to make this castle cake and it doesn’t even look overly complicated but I’m already stressed out about other things so I don’t think I should try anything that has even a remote possibility of raising my blood pressure in any way.

Tomorrow, in between work stuff, housework, taking care of two kids, and trying to eat/pee/breathe, I’ll make the sauce for the lasagna, assemble it, bake it, and stick it in the fridge to be reheated on Saturday. Then I’ll try to get the cake done in the afternoon so I can ice it and decorate it in the evening after the kids go to bed. I always like to try to get the cake fully done the night before because I always figure that if I screw it up in some way I can have a little hissy fit, throw it across the room and into the garbage (or possibly off the balcony) and then ask George to get me new supplies and I’ll still have Saturday morning to do it. It’s always good to have a plan.

I don’t know why I get so stressed about these parties, they’re always fun and everyone enjoys themselves, and I’ve never once had any kind of disaster involving food poisoning, running out of food so that everyone is starving and has to order pizza, or stoves catching on fire. Also, not one guest has ever shown up with white gloves, ready to run a finger along all my furniture to check how well I dusted. And my floor is always sparkling clean until the first three or four guests arrive and then you’d never know I had even washed it once in the seven years we’ve been here. So I have no reason to get frazzled but I do. I freak out and rush around and worry and then people arrive, I have my first glass of red wine, and everything is fine.

Now to make my to-do list with all 1575 things I need to accomplish by 4 pm Saturday…