Back in November, Maya not so quietly turned 5. She was still deep in the throes of Moana love and asked me to bake her a “Te Fiti” cake. At the time, she also specified that it have chocolate icing and be lime flavored (since limes are green, like Te Fiti). Alas, the reality was a bit different, not that it mattered to her once she saw her cake.

Birthday balloons!

We also arranged for Maya to have her party with Emler Swim School, the same swimming pool company that she and Ian take their lessons with (albeit not at their “home” pool). The pool is indoors! And not very deep! And available!

We did worry a bit about the party though. Maya is a sweet, bright kid with a silly sense of humor, but we regularly are told that she doesn’t interact with her peers. For the longest time, when we asked her to tell us about her friends and their names and whatnot, we were met with either silence or a pouty, “I’m too tired to talk about that.”

I gamely sent out the evite to her class and hoped it would all work out. The days ticked by and we had so few responses. It was hard not to feel rejected on her behalf. In desperation, I sent out a “friendly reminder” maybe a week and a half or two before her birthday, and suddenly the floodgates opened. We went from “I hope Maya isn’t too disappointed” to “holy shit, should I bake a second cake?”

Moana, age 5

The cake provided its own set of challenges. I was tricked by YouTube. I wanted to make Maya a green cake that was wildly bedecked with a variety of colorful flowers. After a few YouTube videos showing me how to pipe buttercream flowers, I thought it seemed easy enough. All I’d need were a few supplies and some practice.

I bought the needed piping tips, made some icing, and took my first crack. It was a disaster. There were colorful blobs of … something. None of them really even hinted at looking like flowers. One really good trick I learned though was to pipe the flowers onto little pieces of parchment paper and then to freeze them. Once the flowers are frozen, you can peel the parchment off and stick the ones that don’t look terrible onto your cake.

I had made a delicious but very soft buttercream, so I thought maybe that softness was the trouble. I made a more sugar-dense icing. My resulting piped flowers were no better. I tried store-bought icing. Same. Chilling my icing a bit first. Same. Drinking heavily while piping. SAME!

Te Fiti cake

In desperation, I bought some Russian piping tips, which rely less on the skill of the ersatz cake decorator. The flowers I produced with those weren’t great, but at least they were recognizable as flowers. I tucked them into a bunch of star tip-applied green icing. It was definitely not what I had envisioned, but Maya seemed sufficiently wowed, so I’m going to call it a win.

Lolli and Pop arrived the Friday just before Maya’s birthday. She was so excited about having company. She got to build cars on the iPad with Lolli and tend to the plants and animals in Lolli’s Country Life Meadow game. She played endless hide-and-seek with Pop.

Maya on her “blue like the ocean” bicycle

A couple weeks before her birthday, we took Maya out to buy her big birthday present: a bicycle! She chose one that was “blue like the ocean” and proceeded to try to ride it around in the store. On birthday weekend, she went to the park with Sean, Ian, and Pop and practiced with her bike. We still have training wheels on it for now, but even so, her favorite thing is to go as fast as she can, and it’s a little nerve-wracking to watch. As with so many things, I expect she’ll want her training wheels off before I do.

Saturday night, to celebrate her “actual” birthday, we all met up with Anna, their former nanny and current “date night” babysitter, at Pappadeaux so Maya could have fried seafood. It worked out wonderfully! Maya got to pet a lobster, eat a mountain of fried shrimp, and receive a SLAB of birthday cake from the restaurant (which she didn’t pester our waiter about at all #sarcasm). Ian got to crawl around on the floor under our table, surfacing now and then for a bit of his chicken. The rest of us were able to enjoy a relatively peaceful and delicious seafood dinner.

Caution – 5-year-old swimming

On Sunday, the day of the big pool party, I was baking and decorating right up to the end. In a fizz, we loaded cake, cupcakes, snacks, drinks, and decorations, and I spent the drive over trying to figure out how to get everything set up in the allotted 15 minutes. I needn’t have worried. The folks at Emler had half our stuff set up before we even managed to carry everything in. Did we go overboard when we brought the bluetooth speaker along so the Moana soundtrack could play during the party? Maybe, but I regret nothing.

Maya had a great time! The pool was teeming with the pre-K crowd and some adventurous parents. Lolli and Pop took care of Maya and Ian in the pool while Sean and I made sure the party moved along smoothly. Maya made the rounds playing with other kids (!!!) and Ian surprised us all by willingly jumping into the pool again and again.

Maya’s school friends, Anna, and both sets of her grandparents were exceedingly generous, so she was awash in gifts throughout the weekend. Thanks go to Sean’s parents for keeping the kids entertained all weekend while we did party prep.

Presents!

Five year old Maya is tall and lanky. People are regularly surprised when we tell them her age, believing her to be older. She loves the Moana movie, particularly Te Fiti. She is currently fascinated with the different makes of cars and makes a game of finding different ones on her way to and from school (her favorite is Audi, because of the circles that make up its symbol). Other interests she has cycled through are bugs, space/planets/etc, and birds. She still loves to collect rocks and acorns. She is still playing piano and is just starting to use her left hand as well. She hates the smell of fire/smoke. Her birthday candles caused her some distress this year. Her independent streak has widened, since she’s five now. She now regularly talks about a few of the kids at school, actually mentioning them by name. I have asked her recently what kinds of things she likes, and she tells me that she does still like bugs, but she kind of likes cars more.

School pictures for preschoolers, for whatever reason, seemed ridiculous to me last year. And then we got the photos and they were pretty good. So much so that I was eagerly anticipating them this year. Time for photos came and went. I asked about them at the office and was assured they would happen. More time passed, and I had basically given up. Then one shiny Monday in early November, I happened to see a flyer announcing that they would be having school photos the following day.

Maya – age almost 5, Ian – age almost 3

I was so annoyed. Sean had been gone for the better part of a week, and I was frazzled. And here was yet another decision that had to be made quickly. I was in full on “get shit done” mode. I got clothes washed. I laid out outfits. I thought through all the questions I needed to verify with the school. I never actually *asked* the kids or Sean what they thought about it all.

Needless to say, everyone’s clothes changed to suit their own preferences. In a mad scramble and with an unclear understanding of how sibling photos were getting done, we sent them off to school. When I went to pick them up that afternoon, I got to look at the photos, and to my astonishment, they were great! Maya actually smiled instead of making any of her usual repertoire of goofy faces. The kids posed well together. Ian’s photos actually got done at the same time. It worked out perfectly.