Happy Birthday James!

On July 23, our little James turned 4 years old! After his time with Grandpa Buzz and playing with his logging equipment, James requested a Skidder cake. Hmm, now how does one go about creating such a cake? All you have to do is leave the engineering up to Jeff!


We spent all morning working on the cake since we're on vacation and didn't have anything else to do. James wanted to help so I put him to work unwrapping the tootsie rolls so we could mold them into the claw part. We got busy and when we looked over he had molded a handful into a ball and was eating it!


Here's Jeff crafting the claw-like arm which is the part that grabs the logs.


James wanted to frost something so we gave him a bag of black frosting and he made the mud around the Skidder tires.



I thought it looked like it needed something so we added trees made from the giant pretzel logs. We smooshed some of the taffy we got on our factory tour and shaped it into the green leafy part. Unfortunately our tootsie roll base wouldn't hold up the trees so we ended up hot gluing them to the board.

And here's the finished product. Could a boy be any happier to have such an awesome birthday cake?! The tires are Ding Dongs, the front shovel is a peanut butter bar, peanut clusters are laying around for rocks and we crushed up Oreos to make everything look dirty and muddy. Just like Grandpa Buzz's skidder!




That night we made delicious homemade pizza for dinner. Julie even made the California Pizza Kitchen recipe for BBQ pizza which was nothing short of amazing!! Afterward we had the big birthday party. James did great blowing out the candles.

Jeff had to dismantle the frosted tootsie roll crane which happened to stay attached to the pretzel "logs". We had so much cream cheese frosting on the cake to shape it that a lot of the pieces were almost more frosting than cake, yum!

Harrison picked off the bottlecap headlights. Most of the kids didn't want cake, just the ding dongs and trees.
Here's James with his presents. He got two small Lego sets, his own bucket of Biggie Beads, the kid version of Uno, and a color extreme coloring book.


What a sweetheart James is in our family. He keeps telling me he's getting older because he found hair growing on his legs. I'm not sure where he got that from. He's very excited to start preschool in the fall and take swimming lessons when we get home. Being our oldest, it still amazes me that he is growing up so fast and isn't our little baby anymore.