Happy birthday to you. . .where's the fire extinguisher?

We had Ryan's party Saturday night. His grandmother baked a train shaped cake. I then attempted to decorate it. I say attempted because the icing I got turned out to be too warm, and refused to come out in anything but squiggles. As seen here:



Ok, now see those candles in the picture? They look like candles right? They are special candles, that the flame turns colors. Pretty cool, eh? *note, I had only looked at the front of the box, not the back. This will turn out to be a mistake. "How hard can candles be?" You might ask. Well, read on.

Just because, a shot of the oldest three before we attempted to light the candles:



Then, his grandmother moved in for the lighting. They were reluctant to light, as the wick seemed to have a waxy coating. We reasoned that being special candles that maybe they would just be hard to light. So we kept at it. 3 of them sort of lit, and 2 really lit well. The other 2 never did catch on.

Then the 3 that were sort of lit flickered and went out. The vent to the kitchen is right over the table, so maybe it was the draft, we reasoned. And as someone went to turn off the a/c, the two that had lit well, then lit a little too well. On each of them, the whole candle caught on fire. Being the ever level-headed adult that I am, I took pictures. They are blurry because small children do not sit still.





We then sang a really quick "Happy Birthday" and it was time for Ryan to blow them out:



That poor kid blew and blew, and all that did was kinda blow wax everywhere. The situation was starting to get a little serious, as the flames were about to set the whole cake ablaze. So I stepped in and blew a gust of air that would have made my trombone-playing husband proud.

The aftermath (arrows point to the offending candles, mostly melted, wax pouring down the sides of the cake, and even the cake itself had been melting):



We all had a good laugh, especially since we knew we weren't going to burn the house down. Ryan took it all in stride.

As everyone else was eating cake, I was doing a bit of cleanup and went to throw the box of candles away. It was then that I noticed the back. The back of the box, with the directions. Apparently what we had been lighting as the wick, was the bottom of the candles. We were supposed to snap off the other end to expose the wick. Meh, live and learn. At least this way I insured that Ryan will never forget this birthday!