A philosophical post about cake, in which we bury the lede (in cake)

Back in June, as I furtively ate the remains of my oldest child's birthday cake, I realized that at some point we were going to have to address who owns a birthday cake. Is it the entire family and they can eat slices of cake until it is gone? Is it the person who made the cake, payment for their efforts (as I am the primary baker and primary cake eater in the household, you can guess my preference)? Is it the birthday boy himself? In the past this has never been an issue, but now we have passed out of the halcyon days of Calvin not remembering that he had leftover food. It used to be that he would wander off from the kitchen table, full, and I would dispose of (read: eat) the last of his (tasty) toddler lunch. Now, he comes back half an hour later and asks "hey, where's my girlchee [grilled cheese]?" and I explain that it is gone forever. Normally this inspires no feelings of guilt in me (eat it or lose it, buddy) but when he asked for pieces of his stop-sign birthday cake during the day I felt conflicted as to whether I should deny him from the cake. Pros: it's arguably HIS cake. Cons: I don't want to foster the expectation of cake during the day. Also, then I would have to share his leftover cake.

I think we all know Elisabeth well enough by this point to know what happened: I ate most of his cake. But what will we do in future years, once he starts to point out that it is, in fact, HIS birthday? (The solution I'm gravitating towards is that after the initial song and sharing of cake with celebrants, the cake belongs to the birthday person themselves to eat/dispose of/smash as they see fit. This may mean that Elisabeth needs to acquire her own secret cake to avoid sneaking off with the leftover main cake.)

This came up most recently when Liam declared that we would share his own cake until midnight, and then cake leftovers were off-limits to anyone except him. We ate half of the cake in his preferred method, which is to say that we attacked the cake as a whole like savages, eating forkfuls rather than cutting slices. In deference to my twitching eye at this act of cake barbarism he carved the cake bites off in a clockwork pattern, as if we had indeed cut off slices with a bizarre notched knife.

All of this is a roundabout way, of course, to bring up why we had leftover cake. See, Liam got a new job designing training materials for the fire service at the State of NH, and I had purchased a delicious 8" dairy-free chocolate cake in celebration. He'll definitely miss a lot of co-workers from Bellwhether, but is excited about the new opportunities to come! Our next task is to figure out a new professional wardrobe now that he won't be wearing business-casual logowear all week long.

If you read this far, here is the reward of a .gif of Calvin at a dance class open house, boogying to the music.