The birthday that may well explode her head

The LGBB has just discovered in recent months, on the back of her Dad's, then a little friend's and then my birthdays, that birthdays come with happy feelings. More importantly, they come with CAKE. Or, as one little LGBB calls them, "happybirthdaycake" - all one word, really fast. Perhaps she says it fast so that when she's asking me for some, impishly, with the slyest look she can muster, she possibly thinks I might say "Ok" to the request before I have time to go "Hang on.... no!"

I am going to attempt

...a Hi-5 hand logo cake.

*I hear your frightened gasps*

There is some chance the LGBB won't even recognise what I was trying to go for. I only hope I bake something big enough to fit the template I've drawn out. Oh, doesn't it sound so kitsch already....

At playgroup last week, someone asked what I was doing for a cake. Now, we rarely go to playgroup and have not been for the past term because we go to Gymbaroo that day instead. Anyway, last week was our swansong from that group, I am afraid - I do not need to be invited as an afterthought to a joint 2nd birthday bash for the kids at a bistro, only to turn up with my excited little girl and find that there is no little table present for her, no party hat.... that is just wrong on many levels - she didn't notice but I, as her mother, just died a little bit inside, fearing I had been wrong to not keep flogging the ailing donkey by forcing her to go there every week when it was clear she was just not comfortable in that group, and so nor was I..... Had I been the cause of the other mothers thinking only far enough ahead to invite us but not include us in the Kris Kringle present draw? Not even put a simple cardboard party hat at our place on the table? (at the very end of the table, don't you know it) I was so disappointed and hadn't even thought there would be anything like that there, otherwise I would have chucked one of our party hats in my bag from home, just so she could have one. She didn't notice she didn't have one, as I said, but call me an embittered third child; I just felt so churned up inside that she missed out.

I actually think the only unwise decision I made was making ourselves available for this birthday get-together, in hindsight. We are different to them, Lolly and I. Small talk is not something I am very good at anymore, and not that I am a person who only speaks when it's deep and meaningful, but I just want to talk about things that either or both interest me or the other person and also are enjoyable. I don't enjoy surface small talk with people I barely know. What I do know is that we, the LGBB and I, fit like gloves in other groups and have a thoroughly entertaining time in those social circles. So I just received a lesson that I will trust my daughter's discernment of who she likes to be around. These kids were not one of those groups. Fair enough.

So, I described the cake I was going to make to this mum who asked. I received a smirking retort that I could buy a perfect cake topper with Hi-5 printed on it to put on my cake instead -- or better still, could get the entire cake already made up -- at The Cheesecake Shop. Forgive me for wanting to bake and spend the time, but .... back off! Go buy your cake, it's just not my thing, just like baking one is not yours. I didn't even bother to explain the point that I am one of those "simpleton, tragic" mums who actually like to stress out over getting the angle of a thumb just right on a Hi-5 cake. I don't want to buy one. I want to do it myself. Just for the sheer red-faced, sweaty love of the pressure of it. *

Being that everything good in the LGBB's life is cake and candles, she is going to absolutely drop her eyeballs out of her head this weekend. Her second birthday is this Sunday.

I blinked, I think, because how the heck did we get here so fast??


* And I would like to just soothe the beast in anyone reading by clarifying: the simpleton, tragic bit was just that - a bit. A quip. I don't think of parents (cos dads make birthday cakes too, y'know!) who make their children's cakes as that way at all. I was cynically assuming a projection. Me, I think there is far more satisfaction in DIY cakes than there is handing money over for someone else to do it. However.... that doesn't mean I think people who buy theme cakes are wrong or bad or "tragic" - I personally just enjoy the challenge, that's all I mean to say.