Our first post, or Things Not To Do The Night Before Your Child's Birthday Party

S0, we're jumping on the blogging bandwagon and startin' ourselves a family blog. We really liked what the Boston Giffs were doing with theirs, and we figured it would not only be fun, but would be a great way to keep our widely dispersed family members up-to-date on the goings on of our lives...

So here's our first post... Check back soon, as I'm sure we'll be uploading more recent pics of our family, as well as most likely changing the layout/design of the blog (you know Greg, he's gotta be "artistic" and make it way more difficult and involved than it needs to be...)

And speaking of being way more difficult and involved than is necessary, we move on to the secondary title of today's post - "Things Not To Do The Night Before Your Child's Birthday" - This year, Ashley saw some awesome cakes online, and came up with the idea of making our own cake for Jordin's pirate birthday party... And, like he always does, Greg went WAY overboard with it (pirate pun intended). Since we knew we were starting the blog this weekend, we took some photos of the process so you could see what we went through to come up with our culinary masterpiece...

The Adventure of the Overcomplicated Cake started when Ashley got off of work on Friday night. Greg was already home, thanks to a mild bout of food poisoning. We jumped in the car and headed out to Allen to drop the munchkin off with Grandmother and Peepaw, then set out to get his bike and cake supplies. Unfortunately, the trip lasted longer than we anticipated, so we didn't even get home to start on the cake until around 9:30... and by then, Ash decided that she was too tired and didn't want to help with the cake... Luckily Aunt Toni was totally willing to step in and assist Master Chef Gifford...

So we started off with 3 cakes - one square one for the back of the ship and two football ones for the main "body"

Ash didn't want to use chocolate icing, so we tried to use food coloring to make brown... didn't work so well for us...

So around midnight, I popped over to Kroger and picked up some chocolate icing...

We put a layer of icing between the football cakes to hold them together, then shaved off the top to make it flat... then started with the brown icing...

The square cake pieces kept sliding off, so we used around 20 wooden skewers to hold the back in place... needless to say, we only cut from the front of the cake... we added on the ice cream cone for the front of the ship...

and after another 2am trip to Walmart to buy MORE chocolate icing, i finished the main part of the ship and stopped for the night after getting the railing done on the front...

the next morning, i got up at 9 and started again - had to go to Walmart to get more of the little choco-sticks for railing and then to Toys-r-Us for pirate guys... then i finished up the railing and ladder...

...and added in the windows and detailing... here i'm stacking malted milk ball cannonballs...

and we'll finish up with detail shots of the finished masterpiece...