Let me set the scene, it’s the night before Maddie’s 5th birthday – I’m feeling all weirdly emotional about it – why is it that turning 5 seems like such a big deal? Five? FIVE! Oh my goodness, she’s five!
Tomorrow she has preschool and I’ve promised that we’ll make a cake to take in and share. We set up all the ingredients on the kitchen table. Maddie and Piper climb up on chairs with their wooden spoons and begin to fight over the bowl. This part of the cake-making process is normal. Steve pre-heats the oven for us while he’s cooking sausages for dinner on the grill.
We’re halfway through mixing the cake – and I’ve managed to stop the girls from eating straight butter mixed with sugar (they like to taste test at every possible opportunity), and we’re sifting flour and cracking eggs and fishing out broken pieces of egg shell when the oven starts to make a very strange noise. A noise that is getting louder and louder. Steve and I both run to check it, it sort of sounds like it’s about to explode. Or maybe it’s a transformer in disguise, and it’s about to take off into space. Either way, it’s not the sort of noise an oven is supposed to make. It becomes so loud (despite turning it off) that Piper starts to make frightened whimpering noises (Maddie is oblivious, she is taking the opportunity to eat more cake mixture).
Steve figures out that a jar lid that had been sitting above the oven has fallen down through the vents at the back of the oven and into the fan, the blades of the fan are becoming more and more mangled as it tries to continue to spin. Steve runs outside to the fuse box to get the oven to shut down completely. The noise finally stops. The oven is toast.
We continue mixing the cake – a little less enthusiastically now that we’re not entirely sure how we’re going to bake the cake.
When it’s done, I decide to check if I can use next-door’s oven. They’re perfectly happy to help out – thank God for nice neighbours. In fact, they’re so nice that I stay in their kitchen and chat for about half an hour. When I get home, my sausages and cous cous are cold and the kids want to know where the cake is.
Twenty minutes later, I head back next door to collect the cake. My neighbour has already taken it out of the oven for me, tested it and is offering me all sorts of cake decorating equipment – she is the absolute sweetest. I stay for another half an hour chatting again, I can’t help it.
Back at home, we bath the kids and put them to bed – it’s quite a bit past their bed time by now. As Steve and I are saying good night to Maddie and excitedly reminding her that it’s just one more sleep until her birthday, Steve suddenly looks across at me with this panic-stricken look across his face. Present? he mouths at me. My eyes widen. I literally clap my hand over my mouth. We don’t have any presents ready for Maddie to open in the morning. Over the last weeks I’ve been concentrating on several things: uni assignments, work, Maddie’s birthday party for next weekend – the decorations, the invites and RSVPs, the entertainment, the food – how the hell did we forget that it’s actually fairly customary to give your child a present on her birthday!!
A wave my hands at him to stay quiet about it, we kiss Maddie goodnight, creep out of her bedroom and then I make a mad dash for my phone.
“What are you doing?” asks Steve.
“Looking up Kmart’s opening hours.”
“You want to go now?”
“You mind?”
“No, you sure you don’t mind?”
“No.”
I have forty-five minutes until the one that’s close-by closes. Steve reminds me not to go over-board on the gifts – he knows I’m probably about to over-compensate because I feel so guilty that we almost forgot.
When I get back home, we wrap presents, we write on the card, we stick some pretty paper up just outside her doorway so that she’ll see it in the morning when she wakes up. We ice and decorate the cake (managing to trim the edges of the cake so that we can taste a bit before it vanishes into the mouths of pre-school children the next day) and we fall into bed just after midnight.
This morning, after she opened her presents, had pancakes for her special birthday breakfast, and sees the pink cake she’s taking into preschool today she tells me, completely unprompted, “I am the luckiest Maddie in the world.”
My heart melts and I think, holy f*** I love that kid.
Maddie’s Cake