So today Philip turned 8.
We started the day with coffee and dippy eggs. Then he watched Portal videos on YouTube while I baked his birthday cakes.
He's been obsessed with Portal for about a month.
Let me back that up - for m o n t h s he's been watching Portal videos. I don't even know how he first discovered them, but he found some really dark cool videos with a lot of robots singing parodies of well-known songs - Making Christmas, This Is Halloween, The Sound of Silence, etc. Then he started asking me about Portal and how we could get it and how he could play it and if I thought he'd be old enough to do it. My knowledge of Portal encompasses less than a half of a percent of all Portal knowledge, but you know who does know? CJ.
Not only did CJ know, but he also owned both games, so about a month ago (maybe?) I installed Portal 1, and he was off and running. Philip was able to beat the game in about a week, with the help of a few video walkthroughs. Then we installed Portal 2 to a similar outcome.
We had the idea to make him a Portal birthday cake. These were a few possibilities:
I thought the third was the way to go, but I hate fondant. It would have to be iced.
Luckily, I know somebody who is really good at such things.
She used her expertise to assemble and frost the cake to smooth perfection.
Then I freehanded the decoration.
After that, it was time to design and execute the treasure hunt. Regina gets credit for this idea. She came up with a list of hiding places, and together we thought of clues, with help from the
interwebs.
Our objective was a hunt that wouldn't be over in 4 minutes; one that had some satisfying problems to solve. He had the most trouble with clue #2, since it involved an old-school push button phone with letters on the keypad. I thought it would be fairly obvious.
To be fair, it also took Natalie several minutes and a few hints to figure it out.
I thought he'd have more trouble with the Morse code, but he was all over that one, especially since unbeknownst to me, Dad had given him an introduction to Morse a few days earlier.
He has the worst posture.
He wanted meat lover's pizza for birthday dinner, so that was no sweat for me. Mam came up to eat with us, and we had cake and presents afterward.
Birthday presents were : a heat activated Pac-Man mug, some Minecraft Dungeons boxers, a light-up diamond sword from Tess, some really awesome Minecraft sneakers (Mam), and a Lego Minecraft set that has been on his wish list since Christmas (also Mam).
After dinner, Philip and Natalie went off to make some progress on the Lego set. Andy, Theresa, and I finished watching a movie (Knives Out), and then Philip watched Noelle play Portal until it was time for bed.
Happy birthday to our funny, smart, silly, clever, twisted little boy!
