Birthday madness

This is a long overdue birthday post but what with the moving and the illness, it's the fastest I could do.

With our birthdays a day apart, it was basically a week long celebration, only interrupted by the fact that Packrat was ill with what we now know was not H1N1 but pneumonia. Even then, there was much cake and candle blowing to be had.

Many people have told me that at this age, children can't quite be bothered about the gifts they get but are more fascinated with ripping the paper. True although I would like to ban wrapping paper soon as a gesture of environmental civic consciousness. Anyway, I think the same goes with cake.

Because I'm not keen on the twins having too much colouring and sugar, I limit the amount of cake they eat although now that they are in school and have monthly birthday celebrations, I suspect they get more cake than I would like. Anyway, cake is a novelty to them so at the beginning of the birthday week, cake ranked as high a thrill as blowing out the candles on the cake.

Unfortunately, the first cake they had, which was a mango cake, they did not like. I think I only realised recently that mango may not be naturally attractive to everyone. So there was Baby J making me open out my hand and carefully transferring every bit of cake from her plate into my hand and then commandingly tell me "Mommy, eat cake". And this was not because she was being generous.

Their own birthday cake with the family went down better because it was chocolate coated with a what was not a thin film of spit coming from two toddlers who hadn't quite yet perfected the art of extinguishing candles. By the time we got to the birthday celebration organised by Packrat and myself, all they wanted to do was to blow out the candles and the cake was left after a cursory lick to claim possession.















It was a pretty but simple chocolate cake with no preservatives and while tasting like Lana cake did not have the airs of the Lana cake shop staff. Because we had anticipated more people who were eventually kept home by various H1N1 related scares, we had more than half a cake left over. And tradition be damned that we had to blow out a brand new cake, we recycled the half eaten cake for the following night's birthday celebration with my parents.

So generally, all that I'm going to remember about the twins' second birthday was the abundance of cake and candle blowing. There was also the realisation that my two year old daughter was still too small to fit into a dress marked for 6 to 12 months, as seen in this gleeful Yakult drinking photo.






















And as I said, on the second day, there was chocolate cake. Jordan saw that it was good and was pleased with it. All thanks to Aunty YM!

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