Have a spooktacular birthday

Launch schedules slip. Due dates go by and babies .still. fail to make their appearance. Don't try to plan kids around satellite launch schedules. They are both moving targets.

Iris was supposed to arrive before Halloween, and we had to induce labor after Halloween. Do you know how hard it is to find birthday party supplies at the party store when they are stocked for Halloween? This year, we decided to just go with the flow and celebrate a spooktacular birthday.

After the success of last year's cake, we contacted Erin Smith of A Piece of Cake by Erin for an encore. The cake was breathtakingly beautiful, and tasted great, too!
She even put cobwebs along the sides. (Pardon my finger swipe when I lifted it out of the box.)
Can you believe this cake design came out of this drawing that Iris and I made with iPad Brushes?
Erin is a true artist. We'll be calling her again.

I survived the weekend. 10 teens and tweens at a party, 6 of them stayed overnight. Throw in a one day machine quilting class with Frances Moore and the homework for AI* on top of the normal mayhem of soccer and housework and I am ready to go back to work to get some rest.

Oh, wait, I need to get 8 technical reports out the door (no kidding, I counted) and we are entering satellite Cal/Val.

Dear Santa, all I want this year is more hours in the day.

* Mommy and me AI is not going so well. I lost her at Bayesian algebra and haven't been able to pull her back in. This is a nontrivial class. When they said it was geared toward upper division or first year graduate students, they weren't kidding. That, coupled with AI class server crashes and my workload at work and home mean that I finished the homework at 2AM last night this morning.