Dig's birthday

It is Thursday, and time for celebration. It is Dig's birthday.

Everything starts off OK, except that I forget it's Dig's birthday and suddenly shout out 'Is it your birthday?' over a breakfast cup of coffee. Then we have to plan everything. Shark plans a card, which she hides and which Daddy has to find, as part of a birthday game. Tiger makes a cobweb with the glue gun and a toilet roll. Squirrel gets distracted and goes off to play with her dinosaurs before remembering she had a plan and getting Tiger to knock out another cobweb as a second birthday present.

I haven't got any presents to give. I ran out of ideas about 12 years ago and then Dig did absolutely nothing for my 40th so I reckon zero on the gift front is probably fair. I suppose I could offer my body, but he probably wouldn't want that. But when the excitement of the presents is all over, we all push off out the house to gym lessons leaving Dig to get on with some work. We promise to come back later and make cake. Dig sighs.

The plan to make cake goes quite well until the actual cake-making. I manage to mess that up by calculating the wrong amount of flour so have to get Tiger to keep beating eggs and pouring milk into the cake bowl, which is quite a hard thing to do with Squirrel's fingers darting in and out the mix and Shark shouting 'Where's the chocolate?'

Nevertheless, we manage to get to party tea time with an actual baked chocolate cake with lumpy bits in. The candles are lit, the moment duly photograhed and I forget to make Dig wear the big badge that reads It's My Birthday.

The children insist the candles are lit at least twenty times, and Dig is very good about it and keeps on wishing, probably for us all to go away and leave him in peace with his computer. But he never says, otherwise it won't come true, and he blows out the candles quite properly too. He never once set fire to his beard. He wouldn't have laughed about it if he had. My mother once burned off her eyebrows and eyelashes after sticking her head in the gas oven and she could manage a smile after that. I know it sounds unlikely, but that's the sort of family that Grit comes from. We have to laugh at our disasters because otherwise they would overwhelm us and the despair would swallow us whole.

So Dig's birthday passed peacefully enough, albeit that the candle bit took about half an hour, and another year is passed and marked. Next up, wedding anniversary.