Now fast forward to 12:45 p.m. I am in the bathroom blowdrying my hair. My roommates are upstairs. My dog walks into the kitchen, no doubt pulled forward by the overwhelmingly sweet smell of sugar. (A pound of powdered sugar in the icing alone, to be exact.)
You can guess what happened, right?
In all fairness to myself, though, Piper knows not to do things like that. Has she done similar things before? Well, yes. But in general, I can leave plates of food in front of her black little nose with a stern warning as I go pour a glass of water in the kitchen, and while she'll soak the carpet at her feet from salivating, she won't even take a lick.
And since we were leaving momentarily - and since Piper hadn't touched the cake in the hour and a half it sat taunting her from a couple of feet above her head - I wasn't paying much attention. But then I noticed Piper wasn't staked out on the sixth stair on the staircase by the bathroom, which is where she always sits sentry while I am blowdrying my hair. (What can I say? She's a strange dog.)
That's when I turned off the blowdryer and called her name. Then I peeked around the corner into the kitchen to find a very happy dog licking the icing off of what was a very cute cake in record time. Her little tongue was going a mile a minute, and she didn't jump down until I was a foot from her, screaming like a banshee. And what did Piper do?
She slowly wagged her tail, licking orange frosting from her whiskers and staring at me in a stupor. I think the sugar coma was already setting in, and my yelling had no effect whatsoever.
Did I cry? Surprisingly, no. I almost did, especially when I called Stef and Bill to relay the news of their son's first birthday cake, and the response I got from both of them was laughter. It was not funny. At least not at that time. Fortunately, Stef just told me to cut off the Piper-piece and bring the cake anyway. (That's the photo above, actually - Piper certainly isn't that neat in her cake thievery.)
Oh, and then the jokes kept coming. I know of at least two who posed like this with the cake (this one is Stef):
And while everyone kept telling me how great the cake was, I couldn't help but inject dripping sarcasm into all of their compliments. I mean, seriously - when a cake is supposed to read "Happy 1st Birthday, Finn. Have a ball!" and it ends up reading "Happy 1st Birthday, Finn. Have a rall!" ... well, "rall" isn't even a word! How great could the cake be?
But when it was time for cake, we all sang, and Finn smiled and blew the candle out with Stef. He eyed up his piece of orange-iced cake and took a hesitant nibble before realizing that, yes, this tasted mighty good, and trying to shove the entire thing into his mouth at once.
It was Finn who changed my mind about the whole disaster. I mean, look at him.
Piper eating the cake? It really didn't matter, after all.
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