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So this weekend I offered to spend the night with the boys so their parents could celebrate their anniversary.

I found out later that it would only be two of the 3 boys (and honestly, I let out a small sigh of relief because I wasn’t sure how it would go!) So tonight I am writing you here – as a successful single mother for the evening, saying all children here have been fed, bathed and put to bed for the night.

Whew.

It wasn’t however, without much effort. Including our adventure this afternoon to bake a tractor shaped cake (we had the pan mold – seriously, would I even attempt that if I didn’t?) Unfortunately we hit a bump in the road when Reid informed me we had to decorate it blue (his favorite color) because we were putting chocolate icing on it. I had to explain to Reid that there wasn’t a way for us to make chocolate icing blue so we were just gonna have to be pleased with the fact alone that it was shaped like a tractor. Yeah, who am I kidding – like rationale ever works with a 4 year old! So, I decided to put food coloring in the cake batter to turn it blue.

Which was a perfect idea – except we were fresh out of food coloring. (And we were NOT making a trip to the outside world for something so small as food coloring….no way, not worth it!) So with that sad news delivered, Reid tried to get creative and insist that we could use the gel icing tubes to ice the cake; however, I told him that, too, wouldn’t work. But then I had an idea! What if I squirted the gel icing into the batter? It was worth a shot….and it turns out that after many, many squirts, we achieved what the boys described as “a blue but green, kinda blue and green” color. I said it would have to do and we popped it in to the oven.

I have to admit I was a bit scared when it came out because I only saw remnants of blue batter.

I wasn’t too discouraged though, because I figured once we slathered chocolate icing all over it, it wouldn’t really matter anyway! So I lathered it up with some chocolate icing and we took a picture of the finished product. (Disregard the wheel falling off on the bottom right!) It kind of reminded me of what maybe a tractor that’s been “muddin’” would look like…but really, that’s just a guess, because I have never seen a tractor that’s been muddin’, in fact, I don’t even know if they can officially “mud.”

Mission accomplished.