Happy Birthday Bacon

To those of you following the weary misadventures of a life locked in domestic servitude, caffeine dependance and stereotypical cliche, I guess i at least owe it to you to continue on where I left off yesterday...

The ’husband’ finally returned just after noon yesterday. Stood at the top of the stairs, gormless look plastered on his face and the smell of a giant egg fry-up smoldering behind him, he merely asked Egg whether he had seen the snow that morning. (Uh yeah he saw the snow...we all saw the snow...the boys awoke me so bloody early that desperate for even just a few more minutes sleep and enjoying the awe-inspiring view from the balcony windows of the giant storybook-like snowflakes cascading down from the heavens, I had given them each a piece of licorice and they had sat on the sheepskin rug, sweet as angels, facing the giant floor length windows, munching happily and watching nature’s free show...so yeah, we ’saw’ the snow!)

There was no ’sorry’, no ’sorry I didn’t ring and let you know i wasn’t coming home’, no ’i’ll make it up to you’, not even a favourite of mine, ’I know i’m an a____". Nope. Nothing. In the words of the late Kurt Cobain, ’No Apologies’ (good song by the way - go listen to it for old times sake). Oh well.

Egg and I had just come in from a long walk to the grocery store in the crazy April weather - snowflakes falling fast and random all over us, the wind quite chilly and our noses red. (I should add that two days before it had been t-shirt weather, and the parks were festooned with buggies and delirious stir-crazy ’mommies’ ecstatic to flash their pale white winter skin at last and give their winter-weary toes a test run in their beloved ’Birkenstocks’ - i kid you not.

So anyway, earlier that day, feeling all cozy and having no real plans, Egg and I decided to bake a HUGE chocolate cake from scratch - frosting included - and whilst picking up supplies he had decided that such a momentous cake deserved a special occasion - so decided that it would be Bacon the Bear’s birthday cake.

Much later, cake baked, frosted and decorated entirely by little Egg, with tiny stars, three candles and a giant number three, I broke one of my golden rules of decorum and acted like an oestrogen-fuelled lunatic ’mummy’ and carried the cake out with Egg, singing ’Happy Birthday’ to the disinterested bear plopped pride of place at the dining table, while the whole momentous scene was captured for all time on video.

After that...well chaos ensued. Dumpie couldn’t believe his luck - that this delicious slab of chocolate cake at 4pm in the afternoon was all HIS to eat! Pretty soon all you could see were two button eyes blinking out amid frosting and several once pearly teeth coated in squidgalicious brown, while he bounced up and down in his chair to the music supplied by my no doubt still-wasted hubby strumming a few chords randomly on his guitar. Every so often you’d hear a dirty laugh courtesy of ’Le Dumps’ and we just let our deliriously happy baby get on with it and enjoy.

Egg played out the pretend birthday all the way, wrapping up his favourite toy tractor for Bacon in PINK wrapping paper (still his favourite colour God help us) and getting really upset when he pressed the power on button and the lovingly wrapped tractor began to make its way out of the paper! He also wan’t terribly impressed that I couldn’t manage to provide several bright big balloons for the occasion, but I promised him I’d do better next time :)

All’s well that ends well though, and an otherwise boring Sunday afternoon was spent Alice in Wonderland style, pretending in silliness, stuffing our faces with chocolate cake and singing Happy Birthday to a dirty old toy bear who has seen better days...much better days :)