I've been writing a lot of CoLu lately. I like it. Anyway, this particular story is for the dear Empress of Everything. Happy (early) Birthday, Empress. To celebrate, have some CoLu family fun.
When Lucy's birthday came around, she always either made her own cake from a packet mix, or Erik went out and bought one for her. It was usually the latter, just because Lucy usually didn't have the time to bake a cake for herself between her busy work schedule and raising two daughters.
That year though, Erik wanted to do something nice for her birthday. They didn't usually go out anywhere, or at least they hadn't since they'd had their second child, and they never really did anything special either. Lucy didn't care much, as Erik knew all too well, but he still wanted to try and surprise her for a change.
So, after Lucy went off to work that morning, Erik got to work on his plan. He'd told Lucy he'd drop the girls off at school that morning, but that wasn't going to happen. He needed their help to get everything ready. Of course, he'd pay for it later, but it was just one day. They'd survive.
He pulled himself out of bed finally to quickly duck into the kitchen and boil the kettle for some coffee. Next stop, was his oldest daughter's room. Erik knocked on the door frame before letting himself in. "Come on, sleepy head. Time to get up."
Sadie groaned into the pillow before she turned over in the bed and pushed the blanket back, revealing her pout. "Do I have to?" Sadie whined.
"if I have to, then so do you. Now come on, up you get."
She faked a cough. "But I'm sick," she lied. "You can't send me to school when I'm sick."
Honestly, Erik wasn't quite sure where his daughter had gotten half of her traits from. He suspected it was from one of her uncles. Either way, she was just as bad a liar as her mother was. "Nice try, kid. But don't worry, you're not going to school today anyway."
"What? Really, Dad?!"
"Nope. Need your help with something today, so you're getting the day off."
The ten-year-old quickly jumped out of bed and ran forward to hug her father. "Yay! You're the best, Dad!"
Erik rolled his eye as he patted his daughter's head – she needed to go brush her hair, as he quickly realised when he somehow managed to get long strands of maroon hair tangled around his fingers. "Yeah, yeah, I know," he mumbled. "Now go brush your teeth and… Go find a brush or something. We'll pick up breakfast on our way out."
"Where are we going?"
"You'll see." He could just tell her, but no. He was going to wait until he had the youngest up and they were all ready to go. He didn't really want to repeat himself.
Thankfully, Sadie's six-year-old sister, Kensi, was much easier to get out of bed in the mornings, mostly because she was usually already up and playing with her dragon toys in the middle of her room. Erik was only glad that Kensi preferred to play with cute dragons and pretty dinosaur toys. When Sadie had been that age, Erik had been finding decapitated dolls everywhere. He'd found a head in the cookie jar once. He still had nightmares about it.
With the girls dressed and ready to go, and with Erik having quickly finished his coffee and gotten ready himself, he locked up the house and they all got into the car. "So can you tell us where we're going now?" Sadie asked. Kensi nodded, agreeing with her sister.
"Well, we're going to get you two demons something to eat first," Erik answered. "And then we're going to head to the mall to pick up some things."
"What for?" Kensi asked.
"For Mum's birthday."
"Dad, did you forget to buy her a present?" Sadie giggled.
Erik scowled as he glanced back to them in the rear-view mirror. "No, thank you very much. I remembered." Granted, he'd only gone and bought it like three days earlier, but that wasn't the point. "I thought we'd throw her a little party this year. Make her a cake and cook a nice dinner. What do you think?"
"Daddy is bad at cooking," Kensi said.
"Well… That's true. But it's the thought that counts. Besides, you two are going to help me." He wouldn't let them near the knives, or the stove, or the oven, or anything that had a pointy edge or went above room temperature, but he was still going to need their help. They could read the recipe to him… And ice the cake or something.
Sadie shook her head at her father. "So that's why you let us stay home from school. So we can do something for her birthday. Mum has no idea, does she?"
"Sadie, it's your mother we're talking about. Do you really think she was going to let you two stay home just so she could have a nice birthday dinner?"
"You're gonna get in trouble," Kensi sang.
"Yep." But Erik thought it would be worth it. Maybe.
They arrived home a little before lunchtime. Erik had gone through a drive-thru to gets the girls something to tide them over until later, and so when they did get home, Erik had to bring all of the groceries and party decorations into the house himself. Sadie and Kensi had been too busy eating their chicken nuggets and wondering what shapes they closely resembled.
Erik had already had an idea for what to do for dinner that night when he'd gone to buy all the ingredients. It wasn't Lucy's absolute favourite, but it was something the kids actually liked to eat, and it was a constant struggle to find a meal they both liked. The best part was that it involved making meatballs, and the girls always liked to help making those for whatever reason. It worked out great for Erik though, because he hated doing it.
Dinner was the easy part though, so Erik wasn't even going to bother worrying about that until it was later in the day. The cake, however, needed to be made, baked, cooled, and frosted, so that had to come first. Pulling up the recipe for the rich chocolate cake he'd found online earlier, he set the tablet on the book stand in the kitchen, and called the girls into the kitchen. "Oi, demons! Time to come help me."
He was already setting the temperature on the oven by the time they wandered in. Kensi tried standing on her toes to peer over the edge of the counter, but she was still short and couldn't see or reach easily like her big sister could. "So are we making the cake now?" Sadie asked.
"Yep. So… Why don't you grab that block of chocolate over there and break it up into a bowl for me." He went back to leaning over the counter and staring intently at the recipe then. It seemed simple, but Erik was still the worst cook in the world so he knew he was bound to fuck up somewhere. He just hoped it would still be edible. Presentable would just be a bonus.
"Daddy, I wanna help too."
Erik looked down from the recipe to find his youngest staring up at him with a pout. Of course, he knew he couldn't let Sadie help and then say Kensi couldn't help. That would just be unfair. He'd already learnt years earlier that it was better to just include both of them in things anyway, otherwise they cried and Lucy yelled at him. Still, Kensi was a tiny little thing, so Erik knew that she'd need to stand on something. They didn't have any step-stools for her anymore, so he decided the next best thing was a chair from the dining table. He quickly went and fetched one, just to tuck it close to the counter and then pick Kensi up to set her on top of it.
"Don't fall now…" he mumbled cautiously. Thankfully, Kensi decided to stand on her knees on top of the cushion instead, and ended up easing Erik's worries about her falling. Grabbing another mixing bowl, he set it in front of his daughter, gave her a wooden spoon, and then measured out the soft butter and the sugar for her to mix up. "You gotta mix those together now." Lucy had broken the mixer a few months earlier, and since they didn't use it that often anyway, they'd never bothered buying a new one.
"Okay!"
Erik watched the girls for a few moments just to make sure they were doing their tasks correctly – although really, it wasn't like he knew if they were or anything, because he was useless. Sadie finished breaking the chocolate into small pieces, and Erik had her putting it in the microwave for a little while to melt it, all while making a mental note to remind her to use the oven mitts to take the bowl out and stir it. At some point though, after watching Kensi struggle to really do anything with the butter and sugar, he remembered he'd forgotten the vanilla and quickly fished that out of one of the grocery bags to add it to the bowl.
He stepped closer to Kensi then just to help her, closing his hand around her smaller one on the handle of the spoon to help her mix it all together. "Like this, Kens." He may not know how to cook very well, and baking was new territory for him, but he at least knew how to cream butter and sugar together. He'd seen it on the cooking channels he watched in the middle of the night for some reason.
Next went in the eggs and the melted chocolate that Sadie had thankfully managed to not burn herself on, and then it was just a matter of adding the flour and chocolate. And that was where things got messy. In that moment, covered in as much flour as his daughters, the floor, and then everything on the bench, Erik decided to never let his children near a bag of flour and a sifter again.
In hindsight, he knew it had been a disaster waiting to happen. Especially when he'd let Kensi be the one to pour what accidentally ended up being the entire bag of flour into the sifter.
Lucy hummed a happy little tune to herself as she walked to her front door and let herself in. She'd managed to get out a little earlier than she usually did, and her entire drive home, she'd been thinking about convincing Erik to go and pick up something easy and overly-indulgent for dinner. Take-out sounded way too appealing that night, especially when she was tired and couldn't stand to do dishes on her birthday.
When she walked in, Lucy found her house slightly more decorated than how she'd left it. Paper streamers were taped along the tops of the walls, hanging down over the arches that connected the living room and the dining room. Pink and yellow balloons were weighted down on either side of their entertainment centre, and then there was a small pile of wrapped boxes sitting on the coffee table. In the dining room, she found the table set, and there was another balloon tied to the backrest of just one of the chairs.
"Kens, don't stick your—hey, get your fingers out of it!"
"But it tastes nice!"
Lucy raised an eyebrow at the sound of giggling coming from her kitchen. Something smelled amazing, that was for sure, but Lucy was more interested in finding out just what her youngest daughter was supposedly getting her fingers into.
She continued into the kitchen slowly and quietly, hoping to sneak up on them. Sadie and Kensi were hunched over what appeared to be a chocolate cake in the middle of the bench, Sadie holding a piping bag with a yellow frosting, and Kensi seemingly licking her fingers clean of what Lucy presumed to be more chocolate icing. Behind them, Erik was dishing up four plates of rice, spooning some kind of curry and meatballs on top of them – at least Lucy knew what smelled so good.
"What's all of this?" Lucy finally decided to ask, actually entering the kitchen to peer at what Sadie was writing on top of the cake – so far, it just said 'HAPPY BIR'.
Erik jumped and dropped the spoon back into the pot. "Jesus fucking Christ!" Lucy snickering at him didn't help, and he let out a sigh as the girls quickly left their cake decorating behind to wrap their arms around Lucy and wish her a happy birthday. He definitely hadn't been expecting Lucy back so soon. But, they were running behind schedule anyway, only because Kensi had made him watch a movie with her.
Unfortunately, the sticky-fingered six-year-old with chocolate on her face ended up smearing icing on Lucy's white blouse. "Aw, you got chocolate on me, Kens," Lucy frowned as she looked down at her shirt. Really though, she didn't care much. It'd easily come out in the wash.
"Sorry, Mummy."
"It's alright, munchkin." She leant down just to press a kiss to the top of Kensi's head, for doing the same to Sadie as she picked up the piping bag again. "Is this for me?" she asked.
"Yep! Dad let us stay home just so we could help him make dinner for you," Sadie answered, carefully writing out the rest of 'birthday'.
Lucy turned to look over her shoulder at Erik, pointedly looking away like the guilty parent he was. "Is that so?" she asked.
"Daddy's in trouble," Kensi giggled along with Sadie.
He was very much in trouble, but Lucy wasn't going to deal with him right then. Oh no. That would come later. And it was just one day anyway. They had almost perfect attendance so far, so Lucy wasn't that worried about it.
"Well, the cake looks wonderful," Lucy said as she turned back to her daughters, and then quickly reached around them to scoop up a little bit of the chocolate frosting on the side of the cake before turning her attention to Erik cowering in the corner.
"You're not allowed to do that!" Kensi yelled at her. "Daddy, Mummy stuck her finger in the icing!"
Lucy rolled her eyes at her youngest tattling on her. Erik merely shook his head before he pointed out, "But she's the birthday girl so she's allowed to." Kensi could only pout like the true six-year-old she was, but it only lasted for a moment before she started to carefully (and still, messily) pour pink sprinkles around the cake, naturally getting in the way of her sister.
As the girls began to argue (Sadie claimed the message was more important, but Kensi was convinced that sprinkles were better and that Sadie's writing sucked anyway), Lucy just let out a little sigh before she peeked around Erik as he finished dishing up dinner. "So you enlisted our children to help you cook dinner."
Erik shrugged. "I thought they'd enjoy it," he said. "And… We both know how useless I am, so really, it was necessary." He'd had a whole lot more cleaning up to do, and he was going to be up all night taking the streamers down from the walls, but it had still been necessary.
"Uh-huh… Sure… But, you know you didn't need to do anything for me. I was planning on asking you to just run out and pick up some pizza or something."
"I know, but, I mean, we haven't done anything nice since Sadie was little, and I wanted to do something nice for you…" Had Lucy's birthday been on the weekend, he would've just taken her out to lunch or something with the girls. But it was a Thursday, and Thursdays were busy for Lucy, so a reasonably cooked meal and a cake iced by children would have to do. "I thought you'd enjoy it anyway."
"Well, I appreciate it," Lucy whispered, leaning in to kiss his cheek. "And dinner is probably going to taste slightly better than pizza would've."
"Ah, shit. Now you're just going to be disappointed."
Once Lucy had changed out of her work clothes, and the messy cake had been put in the fridge for later, Lucy got to sit down at her designated chair and have her family bring out her meal for her. Oh, how she liked being treated like a queen. It was a nice change. Taking her first bite of the only dish that all four of them could at the very least tolerate eating, Lucy looked to Kensi next to her and then to Sadie on the other side and asked, "So did you two enjoy your day, getting to help Dad cook dinner?"
They both nodded and their faces lit up. "I wanna be a chef when I grow up!" Sadie said excitedly.
"Me too!" Kensi agreed. "I wanna make cakes! And cookies too!"
Lucy smiled softly. Somehow, a day off from school had turned her children into tiny chefs.