Little Man turns 2!

This week my baby boy turns 2! I can't believe it! It doesn't seem like very long ago that we were racing to the hospital to hurry and have him, and here he is a walking, talking boy that's full of mischief, energy, and kisses.
For Little Man's birthday, we had a barbeque with grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, and cousins. For whatever reason, when he woke up from his nap, Little Man was grumpy as can be. And unfortunately, that grumpiness carried on throughout the party. Every time I tried to go get something from in the house or try to get something done, he would scream like crazy and cling to me. He wanted me to carry him or hold him basically the whole time.
It was a bummer, and my little Crab Apple made it difficult to enjoy his birthday!

One of the fun things I did for his birthday was make a fruit salad. Little Man loves both fruits and vegetables. He is especially fond of strawberries right now. So I bought a watermelon and cut the top 1/4 off. Then I used an ice cream scoop to scoop out balls of watermelon. After that, I hollowed the rest of it out, and filled it with the watermelon balls, grapes, and sliced strawberries.

I had a really hard time deciding what to do for a cake. Little Man was insistent that he wanted a strawberry cake. Unfortunately, strawberry cake is a little bit difficult to make look boyish, since it's bright pink! I looked for recipes for strawberry cake that didn't have strawberry gelatin in them, but couldn't find anything. Does anyone know if the gelatin is just for color, or if it would ruin the cake if I left it out? Or do you have a recipe for strawberry cake that doesn't use gelatin? I was even thinking about trying to use my recipe for Fresh Strawberry Muffins, but pouring the batter in a cake pan. But since I didn't have time for a major flop, I ended up just sticking with a tried and true recipe (a boxed cake mix!).
I also had a hard time figuring out a theme for the cake. Little Man loves cars and trucks, fire trucks, dogs and cats, construction, trains-- basically everything!
So in the end, I decided to make strawberry cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, and then make a German chocolate cake. With as many people as there are in our families (we were planning on almost 30 people), I figured it was better to have extra than not enough.  I decided to go with a construction theme, so German chocolate seemed like a good choice, since the frosting kind of looks like dirt (plus, that's my hubby's favorite cake, so I figured I'd try and make him happy, too!).

So, although things didn't turn out exactly like I had hoped, and it would have been much more fun if Little Man had enjoyed himself more, it was a successful birthday party.
Our presents to Little Man were a sleeping bag- since he didn't have one of his own when we took the kids camping last week- and big boy underwear, since we are trying to get this boy to potty train. We were making headway with it, but then Little Man and I got the flu about a month ago, and we've been having a rough time getting him to want to potty train again. I'm sure I'll be sharing our potty training woes soon!

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