New Quote of the Day

Conor: "I'm going to have five quarters of the (inaudible) [probably some sort of candy]

Me: (unnecessarily pedantic) there's only four quarters in a whole.

Conor: What if it's a big hole?

Quote of the Evening

Context: Finn has escaped from his bed again, giggling and trying less and less plausible excuses each time. After a victory lap of the living room, he declares that he needs to go poo and parks himself on the potty. When asked, after five minutes, if he really, truly, actually, needs to be there, he laughs, points at his protruding belly and says:

"Just kidding! No poo's coming now - all the food is still in my small intestine!"

That one's up there with the time my older son tried to explain the birds and the bees to me and his grandmother (with predictably mortifying results).

Because it's never to late to be...ummm...late

In keeping with the sporadic postings, I think it's high time to grace the intertubes with pictures of birthday cakes from parties past. Since the eponymous she lives in Oakland, we dwellers in the house of cakes are hip to what the kids these days call "mash-ups". This means that she has a few tricks up her sleeves that even Danger Mouse (the hip hop producer of Grey Album fame, not the eyepatched mouse who, with his cowardly sidekick Penfold, battled the evil Baron Greenback) would be hard pressed to match. I, like most of this blog readership, would quail if my five year old informed me that his birthday party must reflect his twin passions of pirates and pokemon. It would just seem that the two don't have a lot in common, other than being equally likely to enthrall the six and under set. Undaunted, Lisa set out to create a mash-up birthday confection that would satisfy these seemingly irreconcilable themes - and so I give you Boris' Pokemon-Pirate birthday cake (circa late October - hence the posting title).

A couple of notes about the cake:

1) One of the pokemon (pokemons? pokemen?) pictured is pikachu. Duh, even I know that. The other three, I'm afraid I can't satisfy your curiousity. However, if you do happen to come by the house and have a few spare hours, Conor would be happy to discourse at length about their names, their powers, from whence they evolved, and the techniques they use to defeat their various and sundry enemies. I am assuming that the Oakland Unified School District is implementing a far more poke-centric curriculum than was favored in my tragically unhip Vermont kindergarten.

2) Each of those creatures was sculpted out of fondant by Lisa the day before the party. I believe that they are still living in Boris' fridge, as he loves them too much to eat them. That's kind of cute, though it has some serious Ms Havisham potential.

3) Why yes - the blog author did think of the "poke-ball and crossbones" motif. How remarkably clever of him. He did not, however, think to make the helm of the ship out of chocolate. That was all her.

4) Look at the ship. OK, now look closer - each individual plank was sculpted out of fondant. OK, now magnify the picture. Look closer....and yes, that's right you can see wood grain. Squint a little and look at the end of one of the planks...right again - nail holes! What am I saying here? I'm not sure, other than that the person who makes sure that every one inch long individually crafted plank on her giant fondant covered pirate ship has the correct number of nail holes is no one to be trifled with.