Happy Birthday, Buddy!!

So this time of year is absolutely, positively crazy for us here in the Auten household!!!  The middle of May brings SOL testing, Mother's Day, and then from May 23-June 7 we have 3 birthdays in this house, right in a row.  Boom, boom, boom.  It's cake and ice cream and presents for a straight month!  :-)  Anyway, I want this post to focus on my (now) 14-year old son, Josh.

Josh is our first-born, and we couldn't be prouder of him.  He has a HUGE heart, is well-liked,  loves sports, and does well in school.  However, as a teenager, he's become increasingly hard to buy gifts for, and in the past few years we've just resorted to giving him a gift card.  This year, we decided on giving him cash.  But, instead of just putting the money in a envelope with a card, I wanted to come up with some clever way to make him "work" for it.

A few months ago, one of my customers, Patty, made these cute little cake boxes for our WOTG club.  You can see my post about them here.  I thought it would be fun if I made Josh a "cake", and filled each box with "filling".  I would hide the money in the "filling", and challenge him to find his present.  :-)  Now, since I was coming up with this brilliant idea the night before his birthday, I was running short on time, and not sure I could get all of the boxes cut out by hand, using the template that Patty shared with us.  Then it hit me......I  remembered that one of my Cricut cartridges has an image similar to the cake box template.  I sorted through all my cartridges, and VOILA!  There it was....cake box, on Tags, Bags, Boxes and More.   Wahoo!!!  This would make things so much simpler!  So I started cutting, and here is what I ended up with:  (note.....these papers are Basic Grey, not Close To My Heart....I encourage my customers to actually use what they have, not just let it sit on the shelf, so I'm trying to follow my own advice, and use up my very LARGE stash of pre-CTMH paper!!)

This is a picture of one of the "slices" of cake

Here it is with the "filling"...I decided to use Easter grass, and cut up straws. 

 I rolled a $50 bill into one of the straws, and he had to find which one it was.  Sort of a "needle-in-a-haystack" theory.  :-)

A picture of the completed "cake".  This was presented to Josh with a note that simply said "You may want to eat this cake, but you can't.....look through the filling to find your friend Grant". 

Josh trying to figure out where his present really is.  ;-)

The aftermath

It took Josh a while to figure out he was looking for money.  I think he enjoyed the "puzzle", and it was much more gratifying to watch, than just simply opening a card, taking the money and tossing the card aside.

Happy birthday, Josh!!  We love you, buddy!