Birthday Bloopers

Birthday Bloopers

Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.

Psalm 139:14

When it comes to celebrating my husband’s birthday, I have made some bloopers.

Noel and I had been married only a few months. I was going to cook a special, romantic birthday dinner. I found an interesting recipe, but it required translating. With instructions I could understand, I set about making “Tom Selleck’s Chicken in White Wine,” wondering why the recipe spoke of wine when none was listed.

One medium onion. One cup Marsala.

I checked the recipe: A cup of curry seemed rather excessive. Perhaps I had misread. No, the recipe clearly stated one cup. But I thought I needed masala curry, unbeknownst to me one of the hottest curries. I did not know that Marsala was a sweet Italian wine.

It took only two bites to realize our taste buds would not survive the meal.

My second blooper ended on a cooler note several years later.

Noel loved Carvel ice cream. I secretly ordered an ice cream cake with “Happy Birthday, Noel” written in a blue Jell-O–type icing.

The afternoon of Noel’s birthday, I jumped into the car with Ryan, our four-year-old son. We had guests coming for dinner, and I had to pick up the cake secretly.

“’Bye, Daddy. We’re going to fetch your ice cream birthday cake.”

Groan.

So much for a surprise! But I was the one in for a surprise. What looked like a dinner plate–size cake in the catalogue turned out to be side plate size. To make matters worse, I did not refreeze it once home, so when cake time came, we had a cake larger than a dinner plate. The problem was it was barely an inch high.

We now eat out on birthdays.

Thankfully, God does not make birthday bloopers. He wove us together in our mothers’ wombs, journaling every day of our lives before we were born. That is how special we are to him.

—Marion C. Ueckermann

Father, every day of my life is noteworthy to you. From the moment I was conceived, you had a unique plan for me. Help me to follow your will. Amen.