Y3 - 79/365: Snow Way Out

These were the cakes that had me up until 6am this morning baking, icing, and decorating...for the birthday party that never happened.

I decided that since my mom always baked our birthday cakes, it should be no different for Ryan and until he asks for something otherwise, it's how I plan to continue. We bought the things we needed last night from Tesco and as soon as Ryan was up in bed asleep I got started.

Originally I was sent this recipe to make a monkey cake...but then I changed my mind on making the monkey and moved the ears up a little higher as well as altered the face so it was a bear instead -- perfect for the theme of 'Teddy Bears Picnic.' I made a regular cake for all the party guests and an individual "smash cake" for Ryan to...well, smash into as he sees fit.

Unfortunately we woke up to a smaller scale of the following...

There was probably half as much snow than in this photo when we were up well before 10am this morning. Despite my not getting any sleep and Matt sleeping down on the sofa, I was up by twenty past 9 and trying to get Matt alert enough to look after Ryan while I hopped in the shower. We had a visit booked with Santa in his grotto at Merry Hill and were then planning on meeting up with Em, Daz & Amy at Build-a-Bear to make some teddy bear friends for Ryan's indoor picnic birthday party.

Sadly, we had to re-book Santa because of the snow and Matt could already see the roads would be bad as they forecasted over 25cm of snow for the weekend. This then caused a chain reaction of us having to further cancel/postpone Ryan's birthday party. We only had 2-3 more guests planning to come other than Em, Daz & Amy and Matt's parents, but it wasn't worth the risk of travel when we looked at the big picture.

This didn't stop me, of course, from having a wave of disappointment for feeling like I stayed awake and baked cakes for nothing. Thankfully I was over it by mid-day when I could see the snowfall wasn't letting up and it was getting quite bad.


By 3pm I wanted to get some photos of the street we live on to show just how much we had so I got dressed in an old pair of jeans, Matt's work boots and puffy coat and a head scarf...yeah, I looked hot! I ventured to the end of the drive carefully navigating my way through the snow that was nearly knee deep. I had a chat with a neighbour shovelling the end of the drive that we share and eventually made my way back to the house.

Once inside and changed, I went into the front room expecting to see Ryan running around, but instead I saw this...

Bless them.

Matt was actually awake, he just happened to blink for the photo.

Well, he WAS awake...but moments later, that was out the window.

I suppose we all needed a bit of a rest, to be fair.

And with that in mind, I'm going to now cash in on that rest since my total sleep last night was less than three hours.