a two year old's birthday is irony in tantrum form

so noe turned two on saturday. i do have a few pictures of this momentous occasion, but my camera is broken now and i'm not sure how to fix it. moving on....

because we spent the majority of her birthday traveling, noe didn't get her birthday cake until sunday after church. i bought it on saturday on the way to the fall festival, though, so that we'd be prepared. i thought i had gotten the milky way cheese cake, and it was beautiful. mmmm. anyway, after the festival, we got caught up in doing everything that needed to be done to get the sleepy girls into bed and then quickly followed suit ourselves. i realized at about 4am that i had left the cheese cake out. here i am having a nightmare about melted chocolate cheese cake that's quickly spoiling on my kitchen table. so i got up and checked on a crying mali, calmed her down, tucked her back in, and crawled back into bed...again forgetting the cheese cake. we got up at 8:30 and i recalled the probable mess again. so i got the girls up, got them changed and dressed and beautified myself, found fai's belt (no, honey, the black one, not the brown one), packed the diaper bag (without the wipes, apparently), let the dog out, put the stinky litter box out, and headed out the door late for sacrement....yes, again forgetting the cheese cake. *sigh* i'm completely off my game this week. anyway, noe has been talking about her birthday cake for two days at this point (even telling the other passengers on the planes about it), so i'm feeling really guilty at this point and could only hope that it was cold enough in our house to prevent it from becoming unedible.

hm...it looks okay from the outside. the chocolate hasn't all melted away. that's a good sign, right? so we send noe into the living room after lunch (which she wouldn't eat anyway) so that we could get the candles ready and video her first sight of it as she came into the room. this part went quite well. she was excited, though i think it was more for the candles than the cake. so after we took a video and realized the camera was broken and out of focus, we cut into the cake. surprise! not a cheese cake. on the one hand, good because it's not spoiled. on the other, bad because..well, we wanted cheese cake!! anyway, after two days of begging for her birthday cake, my close call with losing the said cake, and our preparation of the cake, then the relief at the state of the cake...noe won't eat it.

let me first explain that noe loves chocolate (i don't know where she gets that...). anything chocolate is good in her book. it's one of the words she pronouces the clearest. it's what i give her to get her to use the potty. the girl LOVES chocolate. so i got her a cake that has tons of chocolate in it. she first pushes the slice in front of her away. then she throws a tantrum for reasons we still have yet to figure out. after i calmed her down, she went back and started picking the chocolate discs that lined the outer edge of the cake off and giving them to her sister with a look of "ew" on her deceptively cherubic face. then she systematically dipped the used candles in and out of her cake until it resembled...well, chocolate cake that has been systematically punched with candles until it's mush. she then held up her finger with a chocolate crumb on it and demanded that the offensive item be removed. finally, she takes one bite of nothing but icing and a chunk of candy bar, announces she's done, and jumps down with the excuse that she has to poop...which she doesn't. and so went the birthday cake that she was so excited about. on the other hand, mali really enjoyed it.

later that night, during dinner, she spies the left over cake sitting on the counter. she's eating chicken, rice and broccoli at this point (three of her absolute favorites) and declares that she wants the birthday cake that she refused to eat just a few hours earlier. and so started another tantrum. after she ate dinner, i offered her some cake...and was rewarded with a grin, a polite "no" and a view of her bare behind as she streaked away to the living room. i think this may be the last birthday we have for her.