Going Robotic

Trevi's birthday is on Monday, so we'll be celebrating tomorrow, with a Robot theme. The thing I'm wondering is, when did birthday parties start having themes other than "Birthday Party"? I'm almost sure that the ones we went to as kids were not thematic. And, as I recall, they were fun, despite the fact that the cups didn't match the cake.

Trevi loves robots, so we're going with that. The gathering will be pretty low-key, though. Silver balloons and a robot cake, a few good friends, and a surprise guest....

As I ran around like a crazy person today, trying to make the house appear less filthy than it is, Trevi turned a robot arm (aka that tubing stuff that goes from your dryer to the wall) into a crayon chute.
In between chuting, he helped with the cake prep.

It's lovely that robot cake construction only involves squares and rectangles, but I didn't anticipate the ridiculous crumbliness of the arm pieces, hacked from the torso cake. I briefly considered the possibility of a bilateral amputee robot. When you have an amputee in the family, you can get away with stuff like that.
In the end, Trevi and I made an evening run to the grocery store, and I replaced the disintegrating strawberry-cake arms with nice, compact frozen-poundcake arms. Thank you, Sara Lee.
It was nice to have a chance to use another ten drops of black food coloring from the giant bottle of it I had to buy for Clara's microphone cake last year. Grey frosting really does look pretty icky, though.
I spent an uncharacteristically large amount of time today muttering expletives to myself, but I managed to get the whole house in shape, balloons and all, with all systems go for tomorrow.