My son is a big fan of the animated series, Adventure Time, so we had to make a BMO birthday cake. That’s the name of one of the characters that is a living video game console. The main character is Finn, the human. He runs around with Jake, the dog.
I had to watch several episodes over a long period of time before I really got it. All four of my sons get it. They laugh and chuckle, and I sit there and try to get into the imagination groove. I need to laugh more. Humor is a good way of dissipating worries and fears, or taking yourself too seriously.
All of my kids are creative, and think outside the box. I’m sure homeschooling helped. Â I have a hard time coloring outside the lines. But I’m learning.
Actually, my husband and youngest son are dyslexic, and therefore they have the ability to see things differently — more of a 3-D way of looking at things. They are gifted in seeing things in their peripheral vision. Of course it took them longer to read, but they conquered that. (That’s where homeschool outshines the others.)
As for Adventure Time — I like it. It’s very imaginative, and I get to bond with my sons — even when they are mature adults. When my kids were young, it was hard to find a cartoon we could share. I watched He-man and Teenage Mutant Turtles, and I would say those are quite violent compared to Adventure Time. And Tom and Jerry? Those were terrible, yet I know one of my kids watched that show. That Barney character was forbidden — I couldn’t stomach him. Mr. Rogers was difficult to sit through as well.
The other day, my  son told me that the cartoon, “Brave Little Toaster” frightened him when he was little.  And there I thought it was cute. Then I began to analyze the darker side of kids’ cartoons. When I was young, “The Flintstones” was for adults and aired at night. Compare that to “The Simpsons,” which was popular when my kids were young.
So we made the Adventure Time cake with three boxes of cake mix, a tub of fondant, and buttercream frosting. The hard part was kneading the food coloring into the fondant. But I got my husband and son to do that with me. My daughter and son-in-law rolled it out and draped it over the cake. It was a group effort, because that’s the way we do birthdays around here. You use powder sugar to roll it out. And then you’re supposed to use vodka to clean the fondant of the powdered sugar. We used water.
