Une Envie de Sel

 After the botanic gardens, our friends came by for dinner and pink cake.
You may remember about the pink cake from a recent post.

 Though it had been a long (and bonky) day for the girls, they were quite impressed with Q's chalkboard wall (Willa) and play stilts (Maisie), as well as my husband's superb, exquisite, really unparalleled spaghetti.

 Personally, I could eat my husband's spaghetti four or five days in a row, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with no arm-twisting at all. 

I have done so, in fact, on occasion. 

Cold, homemade spaghetti is one of my favorite things to eat for breakfast...right up there with Nutella straight out of the jar.

 Q showing Willa her "chore board". I put that in quotes because it has never been used for chores, but only for its magnetic possibilities and for Q's endless matching games. 

I just noticed that she has her dress on backwards in this picture. 

The dress is from Cara at MadeInMommy, one of my favorite Etsy shops, in case you wondered. Cara has made a few of our wardrobe staples (including the summer pierrot dress on our banner)...this one we have in two colors, because I love the print so much, and because it's so easy to get on to a struggling three-year-old who'd prefer to go starkers.

Q, she'd just as soon wear a plastic bag. But that's Q.

 Though the girls enjoyed the spaghetti, they kept "subtly" asking me when it might be time for pink cake. 

 Finally, it was indeed time for pink cake.

 Pink cake that Q and I slaved over all morning.

As you can see, we gave it the candle treatment again, with some pink candles left over from a previous celebration. 

At this point, we're calling it "playdate cake" to distinguish it from "birthday cake".

Frank, worn out by an evening with three girls under 5, resting on a leftover pink tutu after the celebrations had subsided. 

...I know. I know. 

He used to be called Wolverine. 

Then he was called Logan. 

But to tell you the truth, he was very young when we brought him home, and those names refused to stick. 

We were, at the time, watching a marathon of three seasons of The Wire on the computer. 

When Frank came into our lives, we were watching the stevedore season. (If you don't know the wire, this is going to sound really dorky, but...)

So the puppy earned himself the name of Frank Sobotka, the misunderstood union man, the tortured Polish dock foreman, the doomed stevedore.

At the time, the puppy was so small, pixie-faced and fluffy that the name sounded sufficiently ironic. 

It made us laugh.

Turns out, however, that Frank was the first name that puppy genuinely responded to.
He liked it.

So Frank Sobotka stuck. 

And Frank Sobotka  he remains. 

Pink tutu and all.