It's ninth birthday.

A turned 9 this 5th. Her excitement for birthday celebrations hasn't waned much. But certainly we have been trying different ways to celebrate. I feel she is old enough to understand the need to think of joy emanating from heart then external stimuli. Still a long way to go. So we had a birthday party at play arcade of nearby mall followed by lunch at a restaurant. All in all low key compared to previous affairs where I hosted children and their parents at home  for lunch and enetrtainment.

Two things that needed to be done were cake and return gifts.  So this time I convinced A to do a no gift birthday party. We requested her friends not to bring gifts. I also had hoped I will not do return gifts as well. This did not go too well with anyone at home so I went minimalistic by giving flexible scales that seemed to be very popular in my daughters class.

I enjoy baking cakes but decorating is not my forte. Mostly I would cover the cake with ganache and ask the kids to decorate with sprinkles. till last birthday Ananya wishes for fancy decorations so I conveniently outsourced the cake. But this time around we jointly planned the cake. We had an experience of doing number cake for my son's  6th birthday in January. Building on that idea we decided to do number 9 cake with handmade banner and sprinkles. Other thing she requested was vanilla buttercream frosting. But I have had not very good experience with buttercream. So I suggested chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream filling and whipped chocolate ganache frosting.