Tom's birthday

Tom and his family had invited Joshua over to their house for Tom's birthday. Tom's mother had been exceedingly excited as this would have been the first time anyone, apart from family, would've celebrated Tom's birthday.

His mother had gone all out, she went out and bought all the necessities for preparing a birthday party, she bought confetti, streamers, banners and flags, gift bags, and most importantly a cake. The cake had a picture of Thomus the Bankengine on the top, she had gone to two or three different stores to find a cake with a good picture drawn on the top and she was sure that Tom would really like it.

She'd been so excited that she'd bought everything, except for the food, a month or so in advance, just to make sure she had everything so she could make sure that nothing could possibly go wrong. She'd double and triple-checked everything and even asked her husband to look it over to see if there was anything he thought to be missing. He just said that it was fine and told her to calm down and stop worrying so much.

That did little to make her stop being paranoid, but she moved her focus of paranoia onto the next part of party planning. She was unsure of how to get Tom to go out for long enough to give her enough time to decorate the house. She'd wanted it to be a surprise party because this would be the first party Tom would've ever gotten, she wanted it to be a special and memorable day for him.

In the end, she decided to have her husband take Tom out to get ice cream and to go somewhere to play for a few hours so she could get everything ready. She decorated the house the day before so that she had enough time to make it perfect. However, this meant that Tom wouldn't be able to go into the kitchen or living room, or most of the other rooms downstairs or else he'd see the decorations.

This was a dilemma for Tom's mother for a while before she had the idea to take him out to eat, once her husband had come back from the ice cream parlour after going to a nearby park with Tom, Tom's mother walked out of the house after getting dressed and went over to the car.

She told Tom that she was going to take him to his favourite restaurant because it was a nice day and that you should appreciate nice days by staying outside rather than inside cooped up with the internet and all.

Her husband looked at her questioningly but nonetheless complied and drove them over to Tom's favourite restaurant. Once they were inside Tom rushed over to go to save a seat at their usual table whilst his father questioned his mother, who replied that she'd decorated the house but he couldn't stay downstairs otherwise he'd see. Tom's father realised the issue and wanted to facepalm himself for not noticing sooner, he then nodded and they both followed along after Tom and ordered off the menu they'd ordered off so many times before.

The three of them ended up ordering what they normally did, the order consisted of chicken musahab, lamb kabsa, and pizza. The order was for his father, his mother, then himself respectively. He had also ordered a glass of apple juice whilst his parents had both only asked for a jug of tap water.

The meal was as tasty and enjoyable as it always was and Tom was extremely happy, after they'd finished their meals Tom had asked his mother if he could try one of the desserts in the showcase. She agreed and walked over with him to check out the desserts, in the showcase were various cakes, cheesecakes, strawberry cakes, chocolate cakes and red velvet cakes. There were also other types of desserts such as ice creams, macarons and chocolate eclairs.

Tom looked carefully at all of them with a serious expression on his face.

"Which do you want?" his mother asked gently.

Tom gave this a lot of thought, his delicate eyebrows were pinched and his expression was one of complete seriousness. "Uhm, all of them...?" he asked as his face broke into a small grin.

His mother smiled back at him in surprise and lightly bonked him on the head, "I thought you were being serious, what with your expression and all." she sighed and looked at him lovingly, "So which is it?" she asked again.

"Hmm, this one!" he called out whilst pointing at a medium-size slice of chocolate fudge cake.

Tom's mother eyed it greedily before ordering it from the person behind the counter, she also wanted to have a taste, but she wasn't especially hungry and had recently tried to stop eating so many sweet things in hopes of losing a bit of weight.

When they'd reached the table and the slice of cake had arrived, Tom's mother once again looked at the piece of cake longingly. Tom noticed his mother's expression and stabbed his fork into the cake roughly before cutting a medium-sized piece off the corner. He then lifted the fork and offered it to his mother who was too busy eyeing the cake to notice what he was doing.

Her husband tapped her and she finally noticed before shaking her head vigorously, "No, no, it's okay. You should eat it since you wanted it."

Tom looked at her in confusion, he was confused as she looked as though she really wanted the cake but now she was refusing it, he tried once more. "...You can have it, I have a big slice anyway."

His innocent and cute face which made others do whatever he wanted them to had already melted his mother's heart. She took the fork gratefully and chomped the piece of cake. It was so good that she felt like her tastebuds were in heaven. However much she wanted to gobble down the rest of the cake, she kept herself in check and wiped the fork before giving it back to Tom and watching him nibble at the slice of cake.