Daniel thinks that I am April O’Neil.

Today Daniel turned four. I asked him what kind of cake he’d like for his birthday. In the very early years of parenting, I always bought the boys grocery store cakes with characters on them. There were a couple of years I even tried to make super pretty cakes–Caleb had a really impressive train cake two years in a row.

But decorating cakes is a giant weakness for me. I’m just not good at it, so I resorted to buying grocery store cakes again and just sticking some toys on top of it.

This past year the boys became disillusioned with the grocery store cakes and started asking me to make their cakes. I make cakes all the time, but they are very simple and undecorated. I make the little round cakes. That’s what we like.

So I was expecting Daniel to ask for that too. Wrong.

“Me make my cake myself!”

“Oh! OKay, sure, Daniel.”

Alan took him to the store to pick the ingredients. St. Patrick’s Day stuff lurked everywhere, so Daniel gleefully chose GREEN cake, white icing. Pretty fun, huh?

He really likes to pour all the ingredients into the bowl and stir, so I let him do all of that. He normally helps crack eggs, but this recipe called for egg whites only, so I had to just let him watch that part.

He seemed very happy with it, so we were too. It actually turned out to be quite delicious!

The birthday boy was so happy tonight that it took him forever to go to sleep. Do you know what Daniel said to me tonight, as I tucked him into bed for the second time?

“Mom, what’s your name?”

“April.”

“Like on the Ninja Turtles. You’re April. You know the Ninja Turtles,” he giggled, “Donnie. Ralph! You know Ralph, Mom! What’s he say, Mom? All the Ninja Turtles…”

He was so sleepy he was practically delirious, so I only understood every other word or so, but he was quite happy and excited to discover that his mother is none other than the famous April O’Neil.  I just smiled and told him good-night, as he went on and on and on about April and the turtles.

He had a great day. We all did. This morning I woke up to the sorts of sounds that send mothers straight into euphoria:

Caleb asked me, while I was still in bed, “Mom, would you like some coffee?”

“I would.”

Then I heard him asking Alan, down the hall, “Dad, can you show me how to make coffee? Mom wants some.”

I heard Joshua shout out, “I started a load of blacks!” (Laundry. I’ve told him they’re called darks and lights, but for some reason he says blacks. It’s sort of like when I tell him to say his times tables. Instead of saying “4 times 8”, he says “4 ‘x’ 8”. Try explaining it. I’ve given up.)

“Did you use laundry detergent?” Alan shouted back.

“What? Oops! Oh yeah!” he said as he ran back down. Hey, that’s okay. The boy is doing laundry.

It was not so hard to get out of bed this morning, thanks to these wonderful sounds.

Here are a few photos from our day:

Alan found these number gummies to decorate Dan’s cake. Daniel is obsessed with writing numbers and letters everywhere right now, so he was delighted.

I have got to remember to take a picture of all of his little writings. He does really well with the letters we’ve worked on. A lot of the others look sort of like Hebrew or Arabic. It’s so adorable.

I’d better go. Donatello needs me to help him fight the Krang.