Cake carnage

Today we had two separate birthday functions for Lyla, one with Julie's family and one with mine. The gargantuan pink gift from my parents was a table and two little chairs. Lyla cheerfully pushed the table around the living room as though it were a folding chair on an ice skating rink.

Julie's parents answered with a Cozy Coupe, one of those toys that reminds you of everything awesome that you begged for as a child but never got.

Lyla also had two opportunities to shove cake in her face. The first time was a 7-Up cake made by Julie from her mom's recipe. I had never heard of 7-Up cake, so I can only imagine it is something that originated in Wisconsin but recently came to Minnesota, like Brett Favre. Yeah that's right, we have your quarterback and your cake, suckers.

So anyway, Lyla was ambivalent about 7-Up cake. She poked it with her finger as though it might suddenly scuttle off her tray. Then she waved her hands in the air to signal to us that she was "all done."

Later at my uncle's house, Lyla got affectionate with a Dairy Queen ice cream cake. My family members' reactions were anywhere from amused to horrified, depending on the severity of their anal retentiveness. We have some video footage of the carnage, so in a day or two I might isolate some stills and post them here.

But it was a wonderful moment, a rite of passage that parents romanticize: when the one-year-old attacks the cake. We might have to repeat it tomorrow.