In Latin America, it is not uncommon to get your face knocked into your own cake on your birthday. That's right; your friends or family wait until you've just blown out the candles, and before you stop leaning over your cake, someone pushes your face right into the cake! ¡Feliz cumpleaños!I remember experiencing this years ago with some friends from Chile and Colombia. I was a little shocked at first, but I participated fully in the all-out food fight that followed. Conveniently, I don't have the photos of that event here in Costa Rica, so they can't make it into our blog!
We have yet to experience this rather... um, aggressive... tradition here. Dan's birthday came after only being here for a few weeks and his face
fortunately was not shoved into his cake. We did get a cake from our neighborhood bakery in celebration of Timothy turning 6 months old. No, we did not push our baby's face into his cake. But, it seemed that after realizing that he wasn't going to get to eat his own cake, he would take matters into his own hands. Before I could stop him, his hand was in the cake and then he smeared the whipped cream frosting on his foot. ¡Buen provecho! The disappointment of not getting to eat his cake was reconciled by getting to eat rice cereal for the first time. It wasn't surprising to us that our little guy had no trouble figuring out how to eat from a spoon. He loves to eat and seems to really love both rice cereal and oatmeal. By the
time he's done with the bowl of cereal, it looks like he's had his face pushed into the bowl!Our blog readers can be assured that if one of us ever does personally experience the shove-the-birthday-guy's-face-into-the-cake tradition, we'll write another blog post about it!
