Right? My daughters used to get super excited about their birthdays when they were little; until they were each about eight-ten their birthdays were their constant topic of conversation for weeks ahead of time. Even they never thought of having a "birthday week," ffs, much less demanded that we do something special for them every day that week. It's a birthday, it's not Hanukkah.  I figure it's because they have nothing else to celebrate ever, and no one ever cares about them or does anything special for them. They have no other achievements to celebrate. We have "birthday month" in our house, but that's not one person's birthday, it's four of us who all have birthdays within four weeks (my dad, Mr. Mantooth, our oldest daughter, and me; our neighbor/close friend makes #5 now, but we don't handle his cake obviously). So for a month we're all swimming in cake and end up giving about half of it away. I must disagree with you on grocery store cake, though. Kroger's marble cake with whippy frosting has been our go-to cake for birthdays for a couple of years now; I used to make all the birthday cakes, but since I am shit at decorating we decided to try the Kroger cake for my Dad's b-day one year, and we all liked it so much we just went with it.