Two birthdays in one week. Despite our higher than average total number of birthdays in the family, we don't often have two within a week of each other. Okay wait... Bayley and Aislin, Erin and me... do Kegan and Rhys count? So maybe we do double up occasionally. Bayley turned 17 last Wednesday and Aislin turned 12 on Sunday. We now have more kids out of Primary than in.
The celebrations this week have mostly been about the food. There were balloons and the traditional Happy Birthday posters (custom made by the siblings)and the home movies of the birthday girls as babies, but the focus was definitely the food. The tradition in our family is that the birthday person gets to pick the meals for their special day. Several years ago we had to ammend this tradition to say that they could choose a breakfast and a dinner, but no lunch. We were just too darn stuffed by the end of the day to eat the desserts. So lunch on birthdays is on your own grazing, but dinner and breakfast tend to be fantastic. Oh...if you happen to have a twin, you each get to pick separate meals and they are consumed on different days. This went into affect after a birthday breakfast one hot July morning that consisted of chocolate french toast, chosen by Kegan, and strawberry cheesecake stuffed french toast, chosen by Rhys, or maybe it was the other way around. It is true that I still have a few children who will choose things like hot dogs or cheese sticks, but for the most part the tastes have become more sophisticated. And some children will spend literally months planning their meal, combing magazines and websites for the right recipes.
This year Bayley chose cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting and fruit for her breakfast. Her dinner was chicken cordon bleu with an alfredo type sauce on it, green beans with sugared almonds and garlic mashed potatoes. And the dessert was a white chocolate, raspberry and chocolate truffle cheesecake with a raspberry sauce on it. Luckily, our schedules were such that Bayley's meals had to be broken up over two days. So we could feel free to pig out on cinnamon rolls at breakfast and know that the cheesecake wasn't coming until the next evening. So we finished off Bayley's leftovers on Friday. We took the weekend to recover.
Even though Aislin's birthday was on Sunday, we ate both her meals on Monday. Sunday is just too crazy with church at 8 and then meetings afterwards and firesides in the evening. So, on Aislin's actual birthday, most of us probably missed breakfast all together, the lucky ones got some cold cereal before rushing out the door. And dinner was waffles, a very common Sunday afternoon meal at our house, we did put chocolate chips in them and made a fruit sauce to top them with though. Aislin's day late birthday breakfast was baked brown sugar cinnamon french toast and turkey sausage. The leftover french toast was consumed cold throughout the day by the deprived children whose mother wouldn't make them any lunch. Dinner was italian chicken with both spicy white and tomato sauces on top, tortellini with olive oil, spices and parmesan cheese and more green beans. Dessert was cheesecake again. This one was strawberry, Aislin wanted the cake itself to be strawberry, so I made my regular plain cheesecake but stirred in pureed strawberries before we baked it, so the cake turned out slightly pink. On top of it we had a strawberry sauce, a chocolate sauce and fresh strawberries.
We still have Aislin's leftovers to consume, so I shouldn't need to prepare much food tomorrow. And even when the rest of the food is gone we have one last birthday tradition--that the very end of the birthday dessert is consumed by the birthday child with Mom and Dad one evening after the big day has passed.
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