Kate Gosselin spent her birthday without her husband Jon

On Monday’s episode of Jon & Kate Plus Eight, Kate Gosselin spent her birthday without her husband Jon, who was away on a snowboarding trip.

“I went out to Utah for like five days,” he says in the episode filmed in March. “I just wanted to get back out there and ride with my friends. It just happened to fall on Kate’s birthday.”

But Kate wasn’t alone. Her eight kids, with help from the show’s producers, surprised her with a bus ride to Charm City Cakes, the bakery featured on the show Ace of Cakes.

There, Kate was surprised with a pink lemon birthday cake and her kids got to decorate cakes of their own with globs of colorful icing. It looked “like a rainbow vomited,” Kate said.

“This season, sometimes you’ll see Kate and I interview separately. Sometimes you’ll see us interview together on the chair,” Jon explained in a voiceover. “It depends how things are going. We have busy schedules.”

In the second of two new episodes Monday night, their schedules kept them apart again. This time, however, Kate took their daughter Madelyn, 8, to San Diego while Jon stayed home with her twin sister Cara and their six younger brothers and sisters.

While Kate and Madelyn hung out on the beach and got pedicures, Jon put together the slide for a swing-set he was building, and took the kids on a hike in the woods, where one of the sextuplets, Alexis, tripped with her hands in her pockets, fell and bit through her lip.

Jon called the kids’ pediatrician and then informed Kate of the news.

“We usually don’t call,” Jon says of the couple’s understanding.

“No news is good news,” Kate explained.

The Gosselins did come together to film their confessionals, sitting as far apart as possible in their famous loveseat or with Madelyn between them, but didn’t directly address their recent marital problems.

That was covered in last week’s fifth season premiere of the show, which earned 9.8 million viewers, a record for TLC.From:tvwatch.people.com/