siblings and cakes and stuff

I'm feeling kind of lost on this sibling rivalry thing. As an only child, I just don't get it. I don't know when it's healthy, how to steer it, when the flags of warning have been raised. It all sounds like blaring horns of warning to me, signs that my children are headed down some path to antisocialism or sociopathy or eventual addiction and homelessness. Okay, maybe not that bad, but still.

I have no examples to give right now. Or at least no energy for the tedium of the examples I do have.

Moving on.

Clark's third birthday party is tomorrow. I was going to order a cake, since it's been winter here for decades and we're just now entering into Rochester's most unpleasant season: gray sky and mud. (We have six seasons here; bet you didn't know that. They are: Summer - Fall - Winter - Ungodly Amounts of Snow - Gross Mud - Spring. Winter through Gross Mud takes up 9 months of the year.)

Then my helpful husband, teasing me, said something about how Clark is getting the cake shaft after the castle cake I made for Frances. Dammit. Now I had to go and make something ridiculously time consuming for Clark too. At first I was going to make a Rocket cake (it looked like the party was going in a Space/pirates/Diego combo theme direction) but it has turned out to be a Diego cake. Party theme simplified. I'm quite pleased with it, and it was lots of fun. Will post a picture here soon.

At first I hassled myself for putting on so much pressure to make a fancy shmansy cake. I thought about how we overdo things, buy too many toys, spend ridiculous amounts of energy on parties they won't remember. But, really, the cake is for me; it's a creative outlet, fills a space that I so desperately need to fill with regularity in my life. For now, it's the cakes. At least their birthdays aren't close together.