Sean’s birthday is exactly in the middle of the kids’ birthdays, 15 days after Maya’s, 15 days before Ian’s. Amazingly, we managed to fit in a little birthday celebration for the big 4-2 (you know, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything).

Daddy is 42!

Maya helped choose a couple small things for Daddy. It was really nice to show her how it worked to give gifts to others since she had just experienced receiving so many nice presents for her birthday.

Maya assisting with present opening

She and I baked him the best birthday cake I’ve made so far, a triple chocolate malt cake that is so worth the effort. A couple alterations: first, I used one fewer sticks of butter for the icing and and second, I eventually used a meat tenderizer to smash the malted milk balls to decorate the outside of the cake. It seemed to work much better than cutting them, though it did create a bit of malted milk dust. The cut malted milk balls are shown in these photos.

I am not a cake decorator

We had dinner at Launderette that night. The place is surprisingly kid friendly. They even have a kids menu (though at least the one thing we ordered from it was pretty bland). We enjoyed our dinner well enough even though Ian managed to fling one of their plates to the floor and break it and Maya spent the majority of the dinner standing up in her seat.