Birthday Buzz

Today is my youngest sister's 21st birthday. As I was flipping through some old photo albums and trying to find some embarrassing photos of her to post for the occasion, I got to thinking about a particular idiosyncracy in (about?) the way my family celebrates birthdays.

It's been a while since all of us have been together to mark a birthday, but one thing we usually did when we lived in the same place was to seek out the worst possible cake from Dairy Queen to bring home with whoever's-birthday-it-was name on it. I don't know how the tradition started, or why, but I do know that I miss feeling that rush of delightful wickedness while asking some unfortunate employee to write one of my sister's names out in the most awful of loopy cursive. 'Yes, yes! Can you put a heart over the 'i'? And can you make that 'D' a little more juvenile? It's too legible right now.' (The L. family seems to be genetically programmed to appreciate the inherent humour of teenage cursive. The more dots, loops, and hearts, the better! Maybe it's just us.)

Anyway, since the tradition of cutesy cake giving was rather short-lived, I have only a few photos of nasty ice cream concoctions to share. Luckily, the cream of the crop (so to speak) just happened to be for one of Caroline's birthdays (pictured below). It was originally intended to be a Mother's Day cake, as evidenced by the giant "MOM" scrawled underneath that beaming rendition of a woman resembling Sally Forth (sans black shaggy 80s comic book hair, of course). We got the employee to wipe off the two 'm's and to write Caroline's name on either side of the leftover 'o'. You could (and still can) see the blue smudges from the 'm's underneath, so the employee covered it with sprinkles to disguise the botched icing name job. Sweet.

It's the gift that keeps on giving! Happy birthday, Gare! (PS: Nice red pearl necklace!)