Earrings and cake

We told Emily when she was little that she could get her ears pierced when she turned 8 if she wanted to. For the longest time she had no desire to do that, but it changed recently - probably within the last year. So, last Monday we went and did it! I was so proud of her for being brave!

She was so nervous and said it hurt but she never flinched or struggled. I think it helped that she'd put so much thought into it.

And... this is the only picture I have of her with pierced ears. I'll work on getting a better one later.

I also wanted to put pictures up of Jacob's cake. It was just a cake mix I bought from the store a while ago and then found in time for the birthday, but it was pretty cool.

It had me divide the batter into six bowls, then told me exactly how many drops to put of which (included) color into each bowl.

Then I mixed them up,

poured them into cake pans in the very specifically prescribed order and fashion...

...and ended up with these. The one on the left got a little messed up when I took it out of the pan. But no matter - I just used it as the bottom layer!

I chose not to frost the top, except for to write Jacob's name, because we've been on a bit of a sugar overload here at the Cooper house lately. It was nice to still be able to see the rainbow and also have a good cake : frosting ratio. I always feel like covering the whole cake is too much.

The kids loved it and it was less time- and labor-intensive than this one of yore.
And while I'm linking to that post, can I say, Holy moley, how crazy is it to see Emily at Elinor's current age?! I swear Elinor is still that much of a baby and Emily was never immature or toddler-like. She's always just been Emily.

So, yeah, anyway. Very exciting things happening here.
We are gearing up for school, which somehow starts very very soon. How did that happen?! I'm working on plans to make next week to be the best last week of summer ever. We'll see if my energy holds up!