Finally, I'm sitting down to blog about Ellie's birthday! She decided that she wanted a cake like Mijke. So, that was fairly easy. . .just make a cat cake and frost it, right? Well, if you know me, it turns out to be a little more complicated than that!
I decided to do her birthday party on Sunday, so that all her friends could be there. This year I only invited two families instead of her whole Sunday School class. It was a lot less stressful (well, it was supposed to be)!
However, on that Saturday we were going to have a Missions Conference. Plus, I was going to speak to a group of ladies at a daycare. The owner of the daycare goes to one of our churches, and she asked me to speak to the ladies about "How to Love Our Children". Basically, discipline. Only one or two of the ladies go to church so it was basically an unchurched crowd. I was pretty nervous about it. And, to top it all off, we had just gotten back from vacation and I was struggling with putting my "talk" together. In fact it didn't start to come together until the end of the week!
Saturday morning, I managed to finish my notes -- just before we left to go to the Missions Conference. I was able to stay one hour before I had to leave to get to the daycare. And, that hour was spent in the Nursery (our church had nursery duty for the first hour and we were the only ones there at the time :-)--hey, missionaries are supposed to be flexible, right?).
I actually had a great time, and the ladies were very attentive. They even wanted a copy of my notes to look over at home! The Lord is good! I prayed earnestly for strength and the words to say and, thankfully, the Lord answered my prayer.
There were about 28 ladies present, and I was able to share the Gospel with them -- How to Love Our Children -- God Loves Us (it was neat how it flowed so easily :-)!). I also gave them all the tract "Forgiven" (in Spanish, of course). So, maybe the Lord will use this opportunity to bring some of these ladies to Himself. It's exciting!
Anyway, back to the cake story. . .
So, with all the flurry of activity, I didn't have a chance to frost the cake until late Saturday night. I thought I would just make some chocolate frosting and then whip up a batch of vanilla for the white part. Well, then I had the GREAT idea that instead of making a whole batch of vanilla frosting I would just melt marshmallows. Have any of you ever melted marshmallows. . .in the microwave? By the time I got the marshmallows from the cup to the cake-icer they were getting cold and hard. So, I thought I would just throw the cake-icer in the microwave. Bad idea! The marshmallow started melting (quickly) and coming out of the icer all over the microwave (there's a turn-table in there, so you can just picture the microwave :-(!). Anyway, I finally was able to "frost" the cake with the marshmallow. By this time it was pretty late (or should I say EARLY--Sunday morning). But, I had to clean the microwave out or I would have had SOLID marshmallow to clean up later. So, I was pretty tired on Sunday. But, the cake looked good! Ellie even said it looked like Mijke! And now, TA-TA-TA. . .Here it is!
P.S.--I'm never frosting with marshmallow again! :-)
Ellie had fun opening presents and spending time with her friends. She had a special birthday hat and the rest of the kids had special masks.
And here is our four-year-old PRINCESS on May 28, 2007