Happy birthday!

A few days before Clara's birthday, we looked at some video of her as a newborn. It took me right back to that time, so full of stress and uncertainty, and how gingerly I held the smallest baby I'd ever seen. It took me a week to feel comfortable changing her diaper, and I never got used to all the sensors and alarms that were always going off at different stations around the room.

And how far we've come. I took her in for her twelve-month visit this morning, and she's now 18 pounds, 28 inches, 18 inches head size. That's 10th, 25th, and 80th percentiles.

We celebrated by going to Chick-Fil-A for dinner, which she didn't really care about, but I didn't want to make dinner. And birthdays really should be about the mom too. Afterward we went to the play area in the mall where both the kids had a great time. It was kind of a ghetto little birthday party, but at least it was cheap.

She wasn't at all sure about the cake, although she did eventually dig in. Although I guess I can't blame her for being cautious, since the cake was an experiement.

Do you remember Amelia Bedelia? In one of the Amelia Bedelia books, she made a sponge cake by cutting up sponges and baking them in a cake. I don't know why that's stuck with me, but when my brother named his little girl Amelia, that came flooding back to me. And now that I'm an adult and knew that sponge cake was a real thing, I wanted to make some. So I found a sponge cake recipe for a cake roll, and customized it to what I had in mind: dainty heart-shaped tea cakes for my dainty little girl. They turned out pretty good.

I don't know what it is about birthdays, but they make me want to make fancy cakes. Last year I made a devil's food cake with chocolate ganache, all from scratch, for my husband's.