Sweet Sixteen

Julie's actual birthday was a few weeks ago when we were in Pennsylvania, but we celebrated this weekend with a few of her friends from school. As I mentioned last week, we had homemade pizza, and snacks. For the last 10 years, Julie has insisted on making her own cake. This year she made two. We made bracelets like this.... well similar to that anyway. I'll try to take a picture of Julie's when she gets home from school. After bracelets we went to see The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. It was a great movie! We arrived home from the movies after midnight and the girls decided to sing "Happy Birthday" to Julie. There were a lot of sleeping people in the house so I tried to convince them to do it quietly.

As is Julie's birthday tradition, she made a rainbow cake again this year.

This is it in the oven. If you watched the video, you saw it once it was done.

This was the other cake she made. It's a Devil's Food Cake.

And lastly, I'm going to share with you the scrapbook pages she did a while ago about her rainbow cake tradition. The year was 1999, she was 7 in the photos. She did the page a year or so later. I get tickled when I read her journaling. These pages were done totally independently. She didn't want any help from me at all! I think she did a great job, but she hasn't done any since then. Maybe we can inspire her to get started again.

She made the cake in the afternoon before her party at Chuck E Cheeses. **The colors are so vibrant because we used cake decorator coloring paste instead of the food coloring that she used this year.

After the party, she put icing on the sides and in a few places on the top. She definitely always had her own way of doing things. This is the child of mine that I always said was "born with her own agenda" ... from day one!