I want those eggs!!!!

Lucy loves hunting for Easter eggs, even if they are filled with rubber stamps and stale peanuts.


Easter is a huge holiday for me. This might be surprising to some of you who know that my parents are both atheists, with my dad actually being kind of a dyed-in-the-wool, crazy, born again kind of atheist. But despite all this, Easter was a big thing in my family growing up. Both of my parents are big gardeners and we lived in a place with relatively harsh winters with lots of snow (Pullman, Washington in no Anchorage, Alaska, but we did get our fair share of snow days growing up and I did frequently cross-country ski on the streets in my neighborhood. Not so much any more thanks to global warming).

So I think my parents were just excited about spring and needed an outlet for all of that enthusiasm. Thus the atheist family next door (us) did more on Easter than many of my catholic friends (except go to church of course). We would have a big dinner of ham or some other meaty thing. And best of all, we would have a big Easter "egg" hunt. I put egg in quotations because we hunted for a lot more than just eggs. My dad was really the main present-giving force behind Easter and he would buy us all kinds of good stuff and put it all in various sized baskets that he then hid around the yard. My mom got us Easter gifts for the baskets too but she tended to stick more to candy and small gifts like fluffy stuffed chickens, rubber stamps, socks, and things like that. My dad typically got my brother and I each one big Easter gift that we would search for madly. I still remember the Easter that I got a walkman. That was AWESOME!!

The point of all this is that even as an agnostic, Easter still holds a special place in my heart. This is our second Easter with Lucy. Last year we had a great time hunting for plastic eggs full of raisins, grapes, and blueberries with our friends Becca, Rob, Ava, Seth and Elise. Ava and Lucy loved looking for the eggs and for weeks after Easter every where we went Lucy was on the lookout for plastic eggs hidden in the shrubbery.

This year I went a little overboard for Easter. I only had 1.5 hours to shop for Easter supplies on the Saturday before the big day. The good thing about shopping the day before Easter is that most Easter goods are on sale. The bad thing is that you don't really have your pick of the candy and so you might not be able to find cadbury creme eggs (the normal kind, not any of these new fangled varieties).

With my limited time frame and my longing for Easters past, I went all out and bought 38 plastic eggs for stuffing and hiding, three Easter baskets for filling with treats for Lucy, Easter pots for my friends Seth and Elise, and enough new socks, underwear, and baseball hats to fill a canvas Easter sack for Mitch. I got a variety of goodies to put in the eggs for Lucy including a complete set of alphabet stamps and a few jelly beans. I also used some pantry staples like stale goldfish crackers and peanuts. I even made an easter basket with toys in it for Josie.

It is the night before Easter and the kids are finally in bed, asleep, we hope. I have out all of my Easter eggs and am carefully putting one letter stamp in each egg, when all of a sudden, we hear Lucy wailing about the bug on her wall as she come hurtling down the hallway. I leap up to try and stop her from seeing all of
the Easter swag but I don't make it in time. As she rips open the door in full wailing, bug-distressed glory, she catches a quick glimpse of the eggs on the floor. In an instant she changes complete course from bug misery to the hoard-monkey that she is as she loudly yells out,

"I WANT THOSE EGGS!!"

p.s. The easter egg hunt was a great success although I think 38 might be a few too many eggs for one two year old. There is still a plastic egg containing the letter X at large in our yard somewhere.

p.p.s. Mitch finally wrote a post to his blog this week and it is AWESOME. He put a lot of neat links into his blog post so I am trying to follow his lead here by including a few more links.




Elise and Josie on Easter morning (does she look like she has a kidney infection to you? Three hours later we were in the E.R...)