It is hard to believe that, four years ago today, I was officially 42 weeks pregnant with Carla… 14 days past my due date… and yet I wouldn’t meet her for another two days.
My Dealing with Birthday Feelings therapy is, apparently, making an elaborate homemade birthday cake for my child. I don’t know how, exactly, panicking over measurements whilst being covered in flour is therapeutic, but it is my thing.
Carla has requested a rainbow cake this year. Which is an improvement over what she asked for previous to settling on rainbow cake, which was a purple cake with black frosting. I am not opposed to that combination, but no way am I cleaning black frosting out of a fancy birthday dress. I doubt there is enough OxiClean in all the lands for that task.
My model rainbow cake looks like this:
Image from thelittlekitchen.net
I am going to follow The Little Kitchen’s strategic plans to the tee. But I am going to kick the crazy up a notch by not using boxed cake mix and instead making my own cake, using the recipe I used last year: Very Vanilla Cupcakes from Sally’s Baking Addiction
Since the cake has many layers (SIX), and since I have proved to be terrible at making straight cuts to the top of a cake, I got myself a little helper. It is a Wilton cake leveler, and I bought it at JoAnn Fabric for $7.99, although NOW I see that I could have bought it (as an add-on item) from Amazon for $4.98. Ooh! I also see it is now on sale at JoAnn Fabric for $5.59. I have not used it, so I have no idea if it will work or if it is destined to become one of those things that languishes at the back of the bottommost cupboard, only to be glared at disdainfully the three times a year you spot it behind the food processor. I will report back.
Speaking of disdainful glares, we have now come to the Bubble Guppies portion of this post.
Listen, I have a lot of problems with the Bubble Guppies as it is. But my current problem is rainbow-related.
I don’t know why this image is so huge, nor why the circles themselves are so THICK, but we do the best we can with the tools available.
My daughter has been singing a little song regularly for the past few months. It’s very catchy, so you can imagine that sometimes I awaken at half past three in the morning with it running in maniacal loops through my brain. It basically goes, “Red orange yellow green purple blue white! Something something something just right!”
That can’t be right, I thought. So I kept correcting her. “It’s not red orange yellow green purple blue white,” I would say, secure in my knowledge that of the few things I can truly accept as fact in the world, Roy G. Biv is one of them. “It’s probably red orange yellow green blue purple white.” Even though I don’t know why they’d tack the white on there, I guess I could ALLOW for it, because of rhythm. And yes, “blue purple” has a different rhythm than “purple blue,” but so what? Children’s songs have made more with less.
But Carla would become quite adamant. She would screw up her face and stomp her foot if she was in foot stomping position, and she would say, “NO Mommy, it IS red orange yellow green purple blue white!”
And I would calmly explain to her about Roy G. Biv and the rainbow and blah blah she’s not yet four so you may already know how well those conversations went.
We did end up seeking out the song on YouTube. And my dear Carla was finally vindicated! The song DOES say “purple blue white” and so now I am furious with the Bubble Guppies for passing on misinformation in such an ear-wormy way. WHY, Bubble Guppies? WHY? (Also, “orange like an orange”? You couldn’t think of ANYTHING ELSE that’s orange? Um, pumpkins? Tangerines? Velveeta?)
I would like to publically acknowledge that the song is not about rainbows per se. But it has insinuated itself into Carla’s brain as Fact. Color Order Fact. So she looked at the picture of the rainbow cake and told me that it was in the wrong order. And that her cake needed to go purple blue, NOT blue purple.
I don’t know if I will be able to misorder the layers of the cake. It will look so horribly WRONG, you know? (Although it will look horribly wrong to Carla if I do it the Roy G. Biv way…) And, more importantly, it will BE wrong. Plus, I don’t want her to go through life thinking that this is the way the rainbow goes! I can envision her failing all sorts of rainbow-related tests in future years, and her teachers shaking their heads and recommending rainbow remediation and our dreams of an Ivy League education disappearing into a bank of cumulous clouds.
We watched a YouTube video of Bill Nye, explaining rainbows. We looked at an actual rainbow. We discussed how mommy is a bit older than Carla and knows a few more things.
Nope. Bubble Guppies are apparently the Final Word on color order.
Basketballs are also orange, BUBBLE GUPPIES.
life of a doctor's wife 
I read almost the whole post without fully understanding the implications. First I was like ooo, rainbow cake, nice. And then, in a completely separate category in my brain, I was like, oh, that is so annoying about color order. Then the full significance hit me. Well. The upside is that when she is older and feels the same as we do about color order (because we are not entertaining the idea that she might not), she will know how much you truly loved her.
I mean, I never thought I would (have to) “No child of mine…!” about rainbow colors. Parenting is a surprise a minute.
It’s Carla’s birthday cake choice so you should do it her way. No one else will fret over the color order….if they do….have Carla sing the song for them.
Hahahaha – I don’t think I CAN. If she wanted “happy” spelled with one P because that’s how she thought it was spelled, I wouldn’t do that, either!
Um – surely it’s also just really confusing to teach them that indigo is purple?! That makes learning the mnemonic doubly problematic – as does the fact that everyone knows that it’s actually Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain! 🌈
I had never heard that mnemonic! Also, in my experience, children’s books/videos/tv shows just skip over indigo altogether. 😐 An indigo indignity, for sure.
OMG I just burst out laughing. I can’t lie, when Sadie was into Bubble Guppies I really liked the music! And the minute I read that rainbow colors sentence I immediately started singing the song in my head. But I never realized it wasn’t in ROYGBIV order!
Ha! I could sing along with the song, but never noticed this. We have the opposite problem I guess. My oldest loves rainbows and is adamant about the color order. If all the correct colors aren’t available (at a restaurant with crayons for instance) all is lost.
I made an ombré (this word makes me sigh but is the best descriptor) layer cake for a shower last year and it was not as hard as I would have thought, just required planning. The rainbow cake will be so cute. And I think the BG color order would make for a good story, even if it is a little crazy making.
AN OMBRE CAKE. That sounds very difficult and amazing. Do you have pictures to share?
Very similar to the rainbow cake. Just increasing amounts of pink coloring in each layer. I can’t find a picture, but like this (only less fantastic, ha): http://www.countrycleaver.com/2012/02/a-bouquet-of-roses-just-for-you.html
Do it her way because it’s important to her now and it’s her birthday. That’s what she’ll remember. It will be a funny story at the party and to tell her when she’s older.
First time commenter but I have an idea! Do it in her order and then ADD A WHITE LAYER! It’s no longer a rainbow cake but now a bubble guppies cake.
Or maybe that’s just handing too much power over to the bubble guppies.
Good luck! Kids are funny.
I’m impressed with your knowledge of color order. I did know that there are 206 bones in the body the other day, and Coach – my physical therapist husband didn’t. 0: I must’ve retained that from when he was in PT school and I used to quiz him. Anyway, I wouldn’t have caught that the BG had it wrong. I am relieved that my kids are too old to have ever watched Bubble Guppies. I feel ya on another birthday. It always broke my heart a tad that they were not so little anymore. Good luck with the birthday cake – it will look amazing no matter what order you choose!
Well, I a man glad that our son was hooked on Sid the Science Kid for his rainbow education. He never watched bubble guppies. Sid’s version also includes indigo and violet. Good luck with the cake of many colors.
Please, please take a photo of your cake, in Roy G Biv order or otherwise! We want to see!
I am delurking because I wanted to offer SO MUCH SYMPATHY for this problem. A rambling but semi-related story (or, you are not the only one who thinks like this): They Might Be Giants have an excellent, catchy, kids’ song about the sun that starts “The sun is a mass of incandescent gas” BUT it turns out that (apparently) the sun is not made of gas at all, it is a plasma. So they issued a correction song (“the sun is a miasma, of incandescent plasma”), which is honorable but the replacement song is not nearly as good and I play it way less, so I am convinced it will lead to my child screwing something up in high school quiz bowl, or something.
I should add that they also have a good song about Roy G. Biv, now that I think about it. So maybe that could help convince Carla.
Hahahaha I love this so much
I searched out on google just to see if someone else noticed the wrong color order on that song! I’m not alone! It’s so catchy which makes it hard!