My stressed day turned blessed

I went to bed last night with quite a to do list. Something woke me with a start at 4 AM or so and my brain started turning... that's never good at that time of night for me! At 4:30 I got a notebook out in the dark and started writing down my list. At % I finally got up and worked through all the e-mails I had to do. If I was awake thinking about the list, I might as well be crossing things off! By 6:30 I was back in bed, knowing my alarm was set for 7:15. My throat and my stomach both hurt, and I did not want to get out of bed!

The kids were up before I was, and we had to eat and be out the door by 8:30 for an allergy appointment I had. I was a year and a half over due for my "annual" appointment! After that appointment we had plans to meet at a state park for a nature activity involving snakes... that's about all I knew. :)

On the way between the two, I called my friend hoping she'd tell me that because of the rainy morning, the activity was canceled. No such luck... but she did offer to take my kids for me! So I took her up on it, dropped them off, and came home for 3 hours of silent bliss!!! (I think it's about once a year that I'm home all by myself.) Ohhh, how I wanted to take a nap, but I had cupcakes to decorate. I was dreading that, so I knew I wouldn't relax enough to nap anyway. Hands on tasks in the kitchen are not my idea of fun to being with, but shooting for sucess with ingredient substitutions is really not my cup of tea!

But I got focused and busy and had all the cupcakes and cake decorated before the kids came home! And I didn't even screw anything up! Here's what we have for Jacob's party tomorrow:

They are not totally corn free, as the food coloring contains corn, but for once a year, I'll give him that. They're not even as red as they should be, but any more food coloring would have been borderline poisonous, I'm sure. It goes soooo against my grain to feed this junk to my kids! Jacob sees so many other kids with their parties have these fancy cakes and cupcakes, none of which he can ever have. I've never gone all out like this for their birthdays, and I don't think I'm going to do it every year, but this year it seemed important to do it for him. Anyway, it was such a blessing to be able to have the quiet time to focus on it and get it done!