Cupcakes

These are the sunflower cupcakes we took in to Scout's class. How clever are we? Actually, we copied them out of this awesome cupcake book Yah Yah bought us. The brown is an oreo, which as reported by Scout the next day, got rather soft from the frosting and was THE MOST DELICIOUS THING SHE HAD EVER TASTED. The red lady bugs were M&Ms. Hilma gets props for doing most of the tiny black dots on the ladybugs' backs. There were spearmint leaves on the cupcakes too that were disgusting, but people could just pick them off easily.

All Scout's friends said they were the best cupcakes brought in all year. Just call us Martha Stewart.

Scout turns 10

It's been so long since I've posted, I could hardly remember how to add a picture. Apparently I did these in reverse order (see, I used to know stuff like what order to add the photos in) so just know that these events happened in reverse order for the party. Are you confused yet? Good. So am I.

Scout turned 10 in April, but this year she REALLY wanted to do a carriage ride in Central Park (something she's always wanted to do but we've never been willing to shell out the money for) so I did a little research and discovered that actually, it's not nearly as expensive as I had always assumed. AND you can have 1 adult and 4 kids in a carriage, which is perfect because she has three favorite friends so it made where to "draw the line" at who to invite easy.

We spent quite a bit of time in Central park... climbing on rocks, walking around, trying to find this awesome playground we had been to once before with our cousins. We finally found it. They could have played there for hours, but we had to catch the 8.25 train back to Scarsdale, so I loaded them into a cab and headed for Crumbs bakery. MUCH TO OUR DISMAY, it was closed. We were so bummed. What is a party without cupcakes? And I really had my heart set on a red velvet one. Luckily, when we went down to the dining concourse of Grand Central, we found that Magnolia had put a bakery in! So we bought 6 cupcakes but then had a mishap and half of them dropped. We bought the last cupcake and ran to catch our train back home.

This is outside of the Museum of Natural History, where we sat by the fountain and ate our dinner from the Shake Shack. I was so glad Emily was along. I had forgotten to charge my phone, on which I had mapped out every place I was taking them. Plus I use the Maps app all the time to figure out where I'm going. But my phone was dying and I was afraid to use it, in case I needed it later on for an emergency, so I was trying to go from memory of where the Shake shack was. This was difficult since I had never actually been there. Emily knew exactly where to go from Central park! She knew it was one block AWAY from the park by the Natural History museum. What a genius New Yorker. The food was AWESOME and as you can see from Sydney, we had plenty of ketchup for all of our burgers and fries. We had to top things off with a concrete, too. Mmmmm.

This is the horse that pulled our carriage. His name was Michael. Or maybe it was Joseph... I was unclear on whether the driver was Joseph or the horse. At any rate, who names a horse Joseph OR Michael? What happened to something like, "Merry legs"?


Thanks to Joseph (Michael?), I got to be in one of the pictures. The driver took this picture, not the horse.

Seriously. How cute are they?

This is the the train ride IN to the city. We couldn't find a big enough spot for us all to sit together on the way home, so they sat a row in front of me and ate their cupcakes and then got very loud. I pretended I didn't know who they were and surfed the web with what was left of my iPhone battery.

Sorry for the backwards telling of the party, but it was kinda cool like the movie Memento, right? All in all, it was the perfect day. The weather was awesome, the girls were lovely, and I felt so lucky to have the best daughter in the whole world. She really is fabulous... worth a thousand days like this in the city.

I love you Souter!!! Happy 10th birthday.