Hannah, you love to play with your Mega Blocks almost as much as I do. We have a nice routine down. I say I want to play blocks, and you tell me to make a tunnel for all of your trains (and also your ambulance) - and then we busily get to work playing. Today, however, you had complex building plans for your father. You had just come from the other room, you were fresh from a long artwork / coloring session where you would ask us to draw "big Eric" then "little Eric," then "big Joy" and "little Joy," over and over again so you could color them in with all sorts of insane colors. Yes, very fun! You still had Eric and Joy, your favorite art muses, on your mind.
You demanded that I build a big Eric tunnel and a big Joy tunnel.
(Sorry Joy, we started building big Eric tunnel first, and we ran out of blocks,
so you turned out to be a little Joy...)
Hannah, you helped me build, and you made many creative changes throughout the process.
Ultimately, Eric's head was allowed to stay, but...
You decided that his arms had to go.
Apparently you ARE your mother's daughter, after all...
In the end, you checked out how your new people-tunnels worked.
You drove Thomas the Train through Eric's legs a few times and then...
KAPOW! You smashed Eric into little mega block pieces!
I see Kristina has been playing blocks with you when I am at work...
Well, it wasn't the birthday party we had originally planned for Hannah back in Chicago with her cousins, Jack and Kate, as well as Uncle Eric, Aunt Joy, Memaw, Boppa, and Ben & Carole Bartolini. But I did my best to make up for it by making the things that Hannah had been asking for for dinner for the last couple weeks - Green Eggs and Ham. Although I never got around to the shortbread & jello "Eggs" (thank god!), the cake itself I thought turned out, while far from great, better than I expected, sort of. No fancy smooth fondant, and while I actually did attempt to make the cake from scratch, my cakes only rose about 3/4 of an inch - not nearly enough to get the kind of height I needed for my Ham. So the finished project owes thanks to Duncan Hines, box and can. I would be a very bad mom, and terrible wife, for subjecting anyone to such low-brow bakery experiments. But lucky for me, no one, not even the birthday girl, would touch the Green Ham. ?!??!? Who doesn't like cake??? Well, I guess I can kind of understand... But it started out so well...
Obviously, Hannah does not have her mother's undeniable sweet tooth. Here I am on my second birthday (with a much more appropriate looking birthday cake). Let the record show that I did not devour half of that enormous sheet cake on the spot, although it looks as though I would have tried. Pictures in this series reveal that I was presented with the remaining half of my mother's birthday cake (her birthday preceeds mine by five days), a tradition which was to remain in place forever more. Maybe that's why I happily ate much of the Green Ham cake myself...before finally sending it's remains down the disposal. 
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