Bear made his First Communion this weekend!

As much as I wanted to pull together a big to-do, Bean kept us under her Reign of Colic Terror all week. However, I was still determined to make Bear a super-cool cake. If I couldn’t manage a party, I certainly should have been able to decorate a cake.

Unfortunately, Screamy-Bean had other ideas:

But Bear, being the magical boy he is, solved this problem before he knew it was a problem. As the cake layers were cooling, and I was desperately trying to calm Bean down long enough to get to them, Bear exclaims, “Can I decorate the cake? It will be like a cake decorating party!”

With my mom-guilt already at an all-time high, I asked him repeatedly if he was sure he didn’t want me to do it. Nope, Bear found the prospect of decorating an entire two-tier cake all by himself to be too exciting to pass up. I gratefully turned him loose with an assortment of sprinkles and went back to angry-baby detail.

Let me tell ya, that kid was oh-so-proud of his First Communion cake:

After seeing how happy he was, I reminded myself that kids often care more about experiences and memories than appearances. Sure, I could have made him a fancy cake, but looking back, would he have cared about its’ appearance? I don’t think so. Bear will probably remember the fun he had decorating his very own First Communion cake, rather than what the cake actually looked like.

I guess the moral of the story is that, when my urge to be supermom turns what should be fun into a stress fest, I need to remember to see things through the eyes of these clowns:

They don’t care if life looks like the perfect pages of a magazine. I need to keep reminding myself of that, because they’d much rather have a happy, less stressed mom than a perfect cake.