Lighting the Candles

I know I said one last party for Scout yesterday, but I forgot about the one we had on the mountain and you don't want to miss that. So we are holed up in this rustic 70s looking lodge and there is nothing open for miles and miles, except this amazing hot tub out in the middle of the snow. With the 100-ft pines the only thing between us and heaven, it was no wonder we were not anxious to leave.

The girls gave up first and grabbing their boots, they ran barefoot through the snow the 30 feet back to our rooms. I thought they were crazy until I realized that my feet would get colder standing on the deck trying to pull my boots on that they would to just speed-walk back to the door. Actually, it wasn't even that bad.

The girls had put on their silly jammies and cranked the heat so everything was warm and toasty. After we had changed out of our wet things, we pulled out one of those boxed coconut cakes we had brought with us. Now I thought about matches before we left, really I did, but the only small box I could find without bringing a ginormous lighter was probably from the 70s as well. Scout was convinced that she could light the candles that we tried to shape into a 13 because their were only 9 of them in the box. After attempting to strike about half of the matches in the little box, she turned in over to Alivia.

Alivia gave up after only one match; then it was my turn. These little matches didn't have the white striker tip that modern matches have. After two tries, I passed the box to my sweetie. He was our last hope, and he needed to be efficient because there were only a few matches left.

I handed him the box, but honestly, by that time I figured the matches were just too old or defective. Amazingly, he lit it on the first try! (I guess maybe we were too old or defective...) But after lighting just one candle, the flame was nearly at his fingers because the matches were so small.

I grabbed the flaming candle from the cake while he doused the match and after dripping pink wax all over the cake, we finally managed to get all the candles lit at once. A quick rendition of Happy Birthday, and Scout blew even more pink wax all over the cake.

It took me about 5 minutes to carefully removed each tiny piece of wax before my sweetie wanted to cut the cake, and this from the guy who used to eat candles as a stupid party trick...

Happy birthday, Scout... again...