We’re both 12 years old, and like most kids our age, we know what a birthday is supposed to feel like.
There’s usually a cake, candles, presents, decorations and people making a big deal about you. You get to feel important for the day. We’ve both been lucky enough to have birthdays like that.
For the past few years, though, we’ve also spent time decorating birthday cakes for kids around our age who live on JCCA’s residential campus in Pleasantville. We don’t usually get to meet the kids who receive our cakes, but decorating for them has made us think differently about birthdays, about giving back and about some of the things in our own lives that can be easy to take for granted.
Our moms volunteer with JCCA and first asked us if we wanted to help decorate cakes when we were around fourth grade. We were already friends, so getting together to decorate cakes sounded fun. And it is!
We will say that when we first started, we didn’t completely understand foster care or why some kids couldn’t be at home with their families. Decorating the cakes led us to ask a lot more questions.
Why wouldn’t a kid be home on their birthday? Why wouldn’t their parents bring them a cake? What is it like to celebrate your birthday somewhere other than your own home?
There aren’t always simple answers to those questions, but asking them helped us understand that not every kid grows up the same way we do.
Our parents usually make the actual cakes, and we’re in charge of decorating them. We get some basic information, like the flavor and the name of the kid whose birthday it is. Sometimes we’re told to write “Happy Birthday,” and then, for the most part, we get to use our imaginations.
We’ve learned that our imaginations can be a little ambitious.
Once, one of us tried to make a cupcake with grass, a blue sky and tiny frosting flowers. It did not exactly turn out as planned. Another time, a cupcake somehow ended up looking like George Washington, and we still laugh about that one. Peyton’s younger brother sometimes joins us, too, and once managed to use an entire jar of sprinkles on one cake.
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These aren’t professional cakes. They’re cakes made by kids for other kids, and we think that is part of what makes them special.
When we started doing this, we mostly thought it would be something fun we could do together. But the longer we’ve done it, the more we’ve thought about the kids who are actually going to get the cakes because, as we know ourselves, birthdays are a big deal when you’re a kid! You get to feel important on that day.
For some of the kids living at JCCA, birthdays can look different. They may not be able to spend that birthday at home with family, and they may not have people visiting them.
That makes us put more effort into what we create. Even when we don’t know much about the person getting the cake, we know their name. We can make sure it is spelled correctly across the top. We always want them to know that someone was thinking about them.
Doing this has also made us realize how fortunate we are.
We have parents we can ask for things. We can tell them what we want to do for our birthdays. We have opportunities to play sports, spend time with friends and do the activities we love. It can be easy to take those things for granted.
Last Thanksgiving, we had a chance to visit JCCA’s campus with our moms. That made everything we had been thinking about through the cakes feel much more real. We got to talk with kids there, hear their stories and spend time with them.
It also taught us that sometimes helping means just being there. You don’t have to ask someone lots of questions about what they’ve been through. You can talk, listen and let them decide what they want to share. We learned more about what other kids may be going through, and we’ve been able to learn about it together.
Even though we are both busy, decorating the cakes has become something we make time for. Because even if we make just one cake, that’s one more person who gets a cake on their birthday, and when you think about it that way, a little frosting and a lot of sprinkles can mean a lot.
Norah lives in New Rochelle. Peyton lives in Larchmont.
If you or your child is interested in volunteering at JCCA, please visit www.jccany.org.
