Karalee turned 8!

My biggest girl turned 8 last week. It's hard to believe that she is getting so big, while at the same time it seems like she's always been around. I love the person she is and is becoming. At the same time, I miss my baby Kara, my toddler Kara, and my preschool Kara.

I made her a bacon and pancake breakfast. She was much quicker to come down for breakfast than usual for a school day.

Lots of presents for a very loved girl!

I had a baking mishap while making the cake for her birthday party. I didn't want to waste this cake, so I decided to decorate it for her to enjoy after dinner. My first thought was to just decorate it with stripes or polkadots, and I probably should have stuck with that idea, with the cake already being such an odd shape...

But I thought I'd get artistic instead. Hehehe. In my defense, I want to say that the smurfs looked really cute when I drew them with a toothpick. It's when I started filling them in with the icing that things just went...wrong. By the time Kara got home from school, a bit of the blue gel had escaped it's confines, and run down the cake, making it look like clumsy smurf had a little accident. It was pretty funny, though, and her reaction was very gracious. I also misspelled the word "smurfy", and had to erase it, and rewrite it, but had already turned all of the blue frosting gray for the outlining, and couldn't really clean up the smudging there. But it tasted really good!

Kara had picked out a birthday crown at the store, and then refused to wear it. But her sisters were great sports. For her birthday dinner, she asked Ben to bring home Chinese, which was perfectly fine with me. Less time cooking, and more time for decorating :)

Kiersten was very excited to pick out these earrings for her.

She was thrilled to get an Egyptology book from Papa and Grams. It is a pretty cool book.

ready to blow out the "8" candle on her pathetic little cake.

Happy happy birthday to my sweet Karalee!