Where Tilly thinks God is

We just got home from taking Zach to kindy and as we walked in the door Tilly asked "Where's Zach?" to which I replied "At kindy silly!". The rest of the conversation carried on like this:
T: Where's Daddy? At work?
Me: Yep Daddy's at work. (Then thinking I could have a bit of fun with this...) Where's Lani?
T: At school
Me: Yep. Where's Mummy?
T: *giggles* In the kitchen!
Me: Where's Tilly?
T: Taking my shoes off!
Me: Where's Grandma? (they both live in England)
T: Ummmm.... In her house!
Me: Very good. Where's Heavenly Father?
T: At church!

Zach's 4th Birthday Party

Zach's birthday isn't until tomorrow, but since that's Sunday, we did his party today.  I took him to the shop that hires out cake tins a couple of weeks ago with Rhona and Grace and after looking through the entire catalogue he decided on a Lightning McQueen cake, so his party became Cars themed :)  We held it down at Castor Bay beach - there's some picnic tables, grassed area and playground.

Here's what we did -

• To start with the kids made their own personalised number plates and hung them round their neck
• Then races on our race track drawn in the sand on the beach.  After the first race they earned their drivers licenses. Then, because Mater taught Lightning how to drive backwards, we had a backwards race too.
• Then back up to the picnic table for some party food.
• After the food we played Mater, Mater, Lightning (duck, duck, goose made to fit the cars theme!)
• While they were playing Adam went and hid some things for a treasure hunt.  They each had to find a lollypop, a bouncy ball and a toy car.  When the got back they could put their things in their party bag, but keep the care out because next was...
• Painting tracks with the cars.  We had plates of paint out to roll the cars in and then paint tracks with them on some paper.
• And then the presents and birthday cake and finally leaving the kids to their own devices to enjoying playing together at the beach.

It was fun and all worked out pretty well.  Apart from a few spots of rain at the start, but we stuck it out and it passed pretty quickly and stayed away for the rest of the time we were there.

Lani and her personalised plate

First race to earn their drivers license

Lani and Calais in the backwards race

Playing Mater, Mater, Lightning

I didn't get a picture of the painting because my hands were covered in paint and I wasn't going to touch my camera in that state! :)

Blowing out the candles

And now we're all shattered and chilling out at home :)

Lightning McQueen Birthday Cake

I let Zach look through the catalogue of possible cake tins for hire and he chose Lightning McQueen.  This post documents my progress through reproducing the cake myself :)

I hired the tin from a shop in Birkenhead, but it's from Wilton and there are instructions on their website here.  I followed them most of the time, but did things a little differently in places.  Also, I think it could be possible to do without the tin if you don't have access to it, just by cutting out the right shape - maybe even print it off and cut it out as a template.

Here's the tin:

I made a chocolate cake which is pretty firm so would stay in shape when turned out, but still lovely and moist and very tasty, if you'd the recipe, just ask :) (Recipe from my friend Angie - her blog is here).

First stage was to coat the sides with thinned butter icing. Then put some on the areas I wanted to "stick on" the details I was doing in fondant icing.  I put the thinned butter icing on these areas as I came to doing each bit, so I could still see where all the details from the tin were.  I chose to do the details in fondant because I find it easier to work with and like it better than butter icing.

I rolled out the fondant and cut out the pieces as I needed them - I traced them from the tin.  Then laid them on top of the butter icing.

Then the lightning bolt and 95 in orange and yellow

Now most of the were done, so I did the crumb coating all over the rest using the thinned butter icing.  Then used a "writing icing" in black gel to draw the outlines of the details and fill in the tyre treads.  The wheel wells are red butter icing, smoothed over.

Then to fill in the red.  To make it red it is absolutely necessary to get a colouring gel/paste and if you leave it over night the colour will intensify too.  If you buy the liquid food colouring from the supermarket it just won't be concentrated enough and no matter how much you put in it will always look pink :) However, the red did not taste good with such a highly concentrated colour! Or you could get ready made red fondant and cut it in appropriate sections to lay it on like the rest of the details.

The website says to pipe the icing on in stars.  I choose not to do this for 3 main reasons - 1) my ability to pipe icing well is pretty limited! 2) the red tasted awful so I only wanted a thin layer and not big thick stars and 3) I wanted a nice smooth surface, like a car.

So I piped it on in really thin stripes - I actually didn't use a nozzle, I had some diposable piping bags and just cut a teeny bit of the end to leave a very small hole.  Then I could pipe it into the tricky corners.  Ones I'd filled in the areas with stripes I'd smooth over the top with a wet knife.

And finally I used a star nozzle to pipe plain butter icing around the sides just to cover them nicely because they still only had the thin crumb coating on.

And here's the final result:

I was pretty pleased with it and Zach was over the moon.  All three of my little monkeys loved watching me do it and see Lightning McQueen come out more and more :)

Spring School Holiday

Some of the things we've been getting up to over the school holidays...

I got to do a photo shoot for BabyT Photography and had fun using this big beefy camera :D

We popped in to the mall on Friday to watch this kapa haka group and have some face painting done

In honour of the All Blacks being in tomorrow rugby world cup final:

My cartoon double

Tilly was very cute this morning - I'd set them up to watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and she was sitting on Adam's lap while it started.  Then Sam, the weather reporter cam on and she turned to Ad and said "It's Mummy!" :)

Sam from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

They earned renting out a DVD one day this week when I'd had enough of their arguing and boredom over the rainy school holidays.  And since we were going on a day where we can rent them for $1 each I let them choose two :) They picked Megamind too - I hadn't seen it yet, so I may have done quite a bit of hyping it up in the video shop!  I'm glad they went with my obvious enthusiasm - it was great and we all loved it.  And then at the end when Bad by Michael Jackson plays, Megamind dances to it and Zach got up and gave us his own performance with his very own unique dancing style.  We'd also been to the mall that day and got to see a dance group called Prestige doing a short show.  Zach volunteered to go on stage and dance with them too and loved it - Lani was too shy and self conscious :)

If you go down to the woods today

(written on Sat 1st, only just got round to putting the photos on!)

Yesterday was a pretty mental day with my mental 2 and 3 yr olds.  I was trying to tidy up the house - it had only been done the evening before and they had already made a huge mess before we'd even taken Leilani to school.  As I was tidying they were making more mess at a faster rate than I was working at.  While I was busy sorting something out, they'd go off and do somethings else.  There was a lot of me repeating instructions to them many times over to get even the simplest things done, like put their shoes on to take Lani to school.

The final straw came when they pulled the bedding off the beds in the girls room, pulled out all of Tilly's drawers and emptied the clothes on the floor, then Tilly climbed in one of the drawers and did a wee.

Zach called up for me to come down and when I discovered it I just took them both and shut them out on the deck while I cleaned it up so they couldn't do any more damage anywhere!

After that I decided to completely give up on straightening the house and go out. (Don't worry I took Tilly and Zach, I didn't leave them on the deck, although I was very tempted to!)  We had a Teddy Bears' Picnic to go to anyway, so it was good to just leave it all behind and go somewhere where the kids could play by themselves for a bit while I calmed down - it was in their best interests to not be too close to me at that point...

The picnic was great - they had little backpack things to tie their teddy's to their backs and do races, a bear hunt in the trees for sweets and little paper bears, face painting and of course the picnic.  The kids loved it.  And after that I felt like I had the strength to return to reassess the bomb site at home.

Go!

I won!

RWC public training session

(yes, it's the French team.  They are the team staying in Takapuna. Sorry)

About a week and a half ago I found out from people's posts on facebook that there was a rugby training session for the French team that would be open to the public.  The French team are staying at the Spencer on Byron hotel, Takapuna - right over the road from where Adam works.  The kids have been really excited about all the RWC stuff happening so I decided I'd take them after school.

It was fun.  If you could ignore the French-ness :D They had facepainting, but were only doing French colours. Since Lani was the only one who wanted her face painted, I calmly told her there was no way she was going to have the French colours!  So we skipped the face painting and I promised to do her the English flag on her face for her special mufti day at school next week.  They did, however, give out french flags to the kids and I somehow managed to end up with about 8 of them.  (They didn't make it back to our house afterwards)

Waiting for the French team to arrive (they were late!)

Listening to the band while we wait

The French team arrive

The training (it was pretty boring to watch!)