Building The Perfect Beast

Do you realize how difficult it can be to get the "perfect" (HAHAHAHA) Easter portrait of your kid? Completely disregarding all the general tomfoolery associated with "staged" photo shoots, like having props and bribes and actual kid at the ready? And never mind the fact that you have to get the kid to even agree to cooperate in the first place, which is as probable as winning the lottery while being struck by lightning at the same time?

First attempt: too squinty. Also, the shadows are falling across her neck weird. Let's try this again.

Second attempt: more weird shadows. And for some reason now her skin looks a different color than it did before. I blame jellybean consumption.

Third attempt: wrong angle, and that POSE. I thought it would be cute, in theory, kind of like a faux-school-picture kind of thing, but obviously something went wrong here in the execution. (Plus, that isn't quite how I wanted her to pose, but it was the best I could do at the time.)

Fourth attempt: almost great, except for the shadows again. And I swear, I had her turning and spinning and moving all over the yard to try to get the right light angle. I think we had trouble because it was right at mid-day in the early spring and the sun was in Aquarius and Mercury was in retrograde. It's kind of obvious, really.

Fifth attempt: Almost perfect, except THERE IS A STICK GROWING OUT OF HER HEAD NOW. How long have we been outside at this point? (No more than 15 minutes.) And it looks like something might be missing, now, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Sixth and final attempt: THERE WE GO. Thanks, kiddo, you're done here. Now why don't you run off and change into your play clothes, but not before stopping in the kitchen for 2½ seconds? That's plenty of time to get hot bacon dressing on your sweater. (That totally happened.)

What Part Of "Party" Don't You Understand?

G and I took about eleventy bajillion pictures yesterday (okay, maybe closer to 400, but STILL) but we got home so late that we didn't have time to offload them. So in the meantime, I hope that these cellphone videos will amuse you until tomorrow.

First up, Shae singing "Raise Your Glass." You can LITERALLY see the point at which the jellybean sugar high wears off and she gets distracted by domestic waterfowl.

And also: "Dog Days Are Over." I assure you, she is usually much more energetic and dancy when she sings this, but at this point in the day she's a wee bit tired, so let's give her a pass.

I promise that by the end of the summer, I will have incriminating video of her rocking out to Lady Gaga (or worse, Ke$ha) and then my husband will get his wish and she will have no choice but to join a convent to save herself a lifetime of embarrassment, courtesy of her blogger mother.

Easter 2011, Part Three: My Dad's Family

Like I said, Easter is the longest day of the year. By the time we got to my Aunt Cyndy's and Uncle Wiggy's house for the annual Egg and Keg Hunts, we had pretty much hit the wall.

See?

And she is not used to seeing non-plastic eggs, so when she found her own personalized Easter egg -- we all get an egg with our name on it, plus a toy if you're under 21 and a bottle of something or other when you're over 21 -- she tried to eat it on the spot. (I ended up putting it in a salad this week.)

Still, it's a lot of fun for a little kid to run around with a lot of other little kids and make a mad grab for everything you can reach. There must have been $200 worth of candy spread all over my aunt and uncle's lawn.

Shae said she was going to "take out" other kids who got in between her and the "good stuff," and she even had this little move to demonstrate what she was going to do -- it involved something with the legs and perhaps a little kung fu, although it looked an awful lot like Elaine Benes, honestly, only backwards -- but there was SO MUCH STUFF that we actually only brought home a small fraction of the stuff she picked up. Bubbles, we kept. Puzzles and squirt guns and tambourines and recorders were left for all the other kids. Because COME ON. Shae's plenty noisy on her own.

Also: something is not right with this kid because she picked up eleventy thousand Tootsie Rolls and I basically had to force her at gunpoint to stop and pick up the Nerds. GET YOUR MOTHER THE NERDS, KID. Mommy loves nerds.

It was a good Easter. Even if I am still recovering. (And BTW: this is just the present-and-accounted-for under-21 crowd. There are AT LEAST this many who are over 21.) The end.

Easter 2011, Part Two: My Mom's Family

I already complained about Easter being the longest day of the year, and a big part of that is because we have to run around to do stuff with both sides of the family. I love my family, don't get me wrong, and I love spending time with them, but because it was a special occasion that required clean clothes and stuff for church, we had to lug like eleventeen tons of stuff along with us, plus all the extra goodies that we picked up along the way. Sometimes I really think I should join some kind of cult that doesn't observe gift-giving occasions just so I can simplify my life, but then that probably means that I won't get presents for my birthday, and that would stink out loud, so never mind. Just talked myself out of it. The Power of the Almighty Gift Wrap is just that compelling.

We did get a pretty alright family picture out of it. Even with me in it.

And although I did not get a Fudgie the Whale cake because there were none available in a 50-mile radius, my sister got us another kind of Carvel ice cream cake, which was DELICIOUS. I appreciate her trying, though. Also: I hope I never have to live in a world where I can't get a Carvel ice cream cake any time I want one. (They are not paying me to say that, but if they want to, my rates are negotiable.)

Also, there was a cake from the Cake Boss. Friends of the family who were visiting from out of town took a day trip to NYC and Hoboken and waited in line for 3½ hours to get this cake. It was super pretty, and tasted good. There was a nice fudgy filling between the chocolate and yellow layers which was pretty darned divine. But it turns out I am not crazy about fondant, which is a surprise. Apparently I am whipped-cream or buttercream frosting kind of gal. Or cream cheese frosting. Or my mom's peanut butter frosting. Or chocolate ganache frosting. Anything but fondant, I guess.* Although I enjoyed playing with it, like it was Play-Doh.

Oh, and there was quite a bit of running around.

Also egg hunting. My cousin Chris hid the eggs this year, with an assist from my mother-in-law, and we managed to find more eggs than we believe were actually supposed to have been hidden, so either someone miscounted, or else we found eggs that someone else hid last year. Either way, it was a good haul. And by this point we were only halfway done, oh my lands.



* Update: Turns out I just do not like that particular fondant, because the center of Cadbury Creme Eggs is a kind of fondant, and I loooooove those. I guess I like gushy fondant, and not the harder stuff. (I hope I don't get whacked for saying that.)

Easter 2011, Part One: At Home

How is it possible that Easter is the longest freakin' day of the entire year? Can someone tell me that, please? It's exactly as much running around as there is on Christmas, and the weather is generally better, but yet somehow Easter manages to be like three times as long as Christmas is. I really am surprised we survived the whole thing, honestly, and that doesn't even count the part where we were driving home in the pouring rain and trying not to hydroplane into a ditch on the side of the road.

Maybe someone did not have enough Easter candy. (I had only two pieces, actually -- two homemade peanut butter eggs. No, really. I had cake and pie and ice cream cake and ham out the stinkin' wazoo, but not very much candy. Someone obviously did Easter wrong.)

Because I knew that it was going to be a Gift Extravaganza -- and it was, our whole trunk was filled with stuff when we came home yesterday -- Shae's basket from us was pretty small. She knows that Easter is all about candy, so we weren't able to entirely avoid it, but I kept it to a minimum, in easily parcel-out-able containers. Peeps, Good and Fruity, jellybeans, candy rings, and Goldfish grahams.

Also: plastic eggs full of money (6 eggs, $3 total), and all the Shrek movies, which as far as we know, she hasn't seen, yet she knows who Shrek is anyway. I don't know. Osmosis, maybe?

Okay, look: this kid is THE WORST "Price is Right" product model EVER. Or else she is secretly the best. I'm not really sure. Why her first impulse is to cover her face with the item she is showing, I have no idea, but she did that EVERY SINGLE TIME, with EVERY SINGLE THING.

Also: yes, my kid got Tinkerbell Band-Aids in her Easter bucket, SHUT UP. She got an EASTER BUCKET, what do you expect?

Yeah, you got me. At this point it's only 8:00 in the morning, so it's not like it's the end of a really long day or anything. She's just ... that kid who likes to put buckets on her head.

Happy Easter!

Hope the bunny gave you everything you wanted this year!

Even if your particular bunny was a little bit ... sketchy.

One Bigger Happier

While all the kids were together, we managed to squeeze in our second (hopefully) annual family photoshoot -- now with 50% more grandchildren and 100% fewer parents and at least 300% more chaos!

It's not a bad picture, but it's not great. It was much colder than it was last year when we tried this, and this was my first time attempting a quasi-sort-of-maybe-kind-of professional-ish shoot that involved posing an infant. I forgot to remember that getting the smallest of my models to look at the camera was going to be the EASY part. Shae's got something on her face and major hat-head and you can see the tags on the baby's blanket, but at least they're all not looking at the camera in approximately the same general direction.

By the time these kids are all in college, I should have this figured out.

What we actually wanted to do, originally, was get all the kids to pose together with their assorted-colored bunny ears on. Um, yeah, I don't what particular kind of crack we were smoking when we came up with that harebrained (HA!) scheme, but we were at least able to get nice pictures of them individually with the ears on. Joey was the one I worried about, because he does not really strike me as a headband sort of guy, but we let him play with a rake while he had the ears on, and he gave us surprisingly little trouble.

I would like one of these in my Easter basket, please. Are not those cheeks so perfectly, delectably nommable? (What is it about babies that turns people into cannibals, anyway? It has been a very long time since I have seen a baby and DIDN'T think to myself, "That head looks gorgeous and melonious and DELICIOUS." Especially in my family, where we make babies with heads like perfectly ripe cantaloupes. I mean, look at this example -- I JUST CAN'T EVEN.)

This is our fourth consecutive year with this particular pair of rabbit ears, and I for one will be terribly sad when they are handed off to the next "generation." These might be one of those things, like the sweater she was wearing the first day that we met her, that we keep in a special box in the bottom of her closet and never pass on, because they are so much a part of our family history. (Oh, hey, guess who has been working on a birthday movie for the last two days and feels really nostalgic and old today? THIS BLOGGER.)

Easter 2010: Part Two

Almost as exciting as "Leonard: Part Six" -- and away we go!

Egg hunts look pretty much the same everywhere -- this one, on my Dad's side of the family, is just bigger and louder than most others (because I have relatives numbering in the hundreds at this point). Lots of little kids, lots of middle kids, lots of bigger kids. And, of course, the annual Keg Hunt, which is where the legal-drinking-age grandchildren wander around looking for little bottles with their names on them. It's fun. Usually.

Anyway, what I want to focus on this time is how, as the day goes on, Shae gets closer and closer to the Easter Bunny. Perhaps we are getting over our leporiphagophobia*.

Very close to the Easter Bunny. Not quite touching. Looking away, ready to escape, but still in a reasonable proximity.

Allow the Easter Bunny to touch her OMG OMG ZOMFG! You can tell that she is nervous about this, and I can't rightly say I blame her, because this particular Bunny is just on this side of Donnie-Darko-looking.

Standing right next to him, and -- wait, what is that I see when I zoom in?

HOLDING THE EASTER BUNNY'S HAND. Success! Maybe by Christmas she'll get over her whole Santa-is-creepy thing.

* = fake made up word that is supposed to mean "fear of getting eaten by rabbits."

Easter 2010: Part One

So. Easter, my arch-nemesis. We meet again.

I love Easter, of course, because it's one of the few times a year when people don't look at you funny when they catch you eating nothing but jellybeans and chocolate marshmallow bunny heads for lunch. But it's exhausting. I feel like we've been doing these Easter festivities for weeks already.

If you are keeping score at home, her Easter loot from "the bunny" included a bathing suit, a T-shirt, monkey pajamas, two packs of stickers, a pair of sunglasses, some cheap pearl jewelry that is already broken and/or missing, bubbles, jellybeans, yellow M&M's, about two dollars in change, and this light thing that just spins and hums and is absolutely mesmerizing. Best buck-fifty I ever spent this week. When you add in all the swag from the grandparents, I estimate that she got about 8,000 pounds of crap. Not bad!

The third and hopefully final birthday cake. This one is your ever-popular DQ ice cream cake. Yay chocolate crunchies! There might still be some of this left in Aunt Kathy's freezer, and if there is we'll have that with my sister and nephew when they come in to visit. I am NOT getting another whole cake. Can't we do something different, like birthday pudding or something? I am running out of pants.

My cousin Jason was in from Florida for the weekend, and apparently he was on egg-hiding duty. He did an excellent job, photographically speaking. The over-processed egg picture from yesterday was also hidden in Aunt Kathy's yard. Not that you asked, but I chose this particular picture because I sort of dig forsythias, even though they're just there. They're so ... yellow and happy.

This outfit is from last year. I love it. But I remember when these were, you know, regular-length pants. She's grown like 6 inches since last year, but she hasn't gained much weight, and now she's out of diapers, so last year's 3T's still fit. Except, they look like completely different clothes, don't they? Also: it's been like 80+ degrees for a week and this shit can stop any time because I hate sweat, and my feet are not anywhere close to sandal-ready.

Counting the money with Uncle Quack. You know, now that I think about it, I have no idea how much money we actually got. It's all going into her piggy bank, but still. I wonder if we even opened all the eggs yet? I need to double-check when I get home.

This is Jason, who hid the eggs. He had almost as much fun playing with Shae's toys as Shae did. And it's worth a mention that he's going on the family camping trip later. So maybe, just maybe, camping might be fun -- or at least tolerable.

Tomorrow: The other side of the family!

What's the Matter with Kids Today?

You've heard the song before: "Kids! I don't know what's wrong with these kids today! ... Noisy crazy dirty lazy loafers!" I mean, really, this is what passes for an "egg hunt" these days:

How are we supposed to build character in our children if we can't even properly hide Easter eggs any more? I fear very greatly for the children who have a hard time finding these eggs. Probably they'll end up in Congress or something instead of having a real job.

I kid, I kid. We had a great time. Shae likes running around outside, and it was cold on Saturday morning, but sunny and clear, so it wasn't so bad. We got a lot of eggs, and she won 3rd prize, which is a giant chocolate rabbit that I swear is a foot high. (She won't be eating that.)

While we wouldn't sit on the Easter bunny's lap directly, Shae at least got bunny-adjacent. I suspect this is because this bunny is not nearly as creepy and Donnie-Darko-looking as some of the other bunnies I've seen. I'll take what I can get.

And of course there were goody bags. I don't even know what was in them besides a juice box. We went to my grandmother's after the egg hunt and Shae was very generous in sharing her prizes. She's great like that.

This is My Anonymous Mother. She went down a sliding board. And took her purse with her. Because OF COURSE SHE DID. "Kids! They are just impossible to control! ... Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way? What's the matter with kids today?"

(Everybody's Waitin' For) The Bun With The Swag

So, listen: I was going to take the lyrics to "(Everybody's Waitin' For) The Man With The Bag," one of my very favorite modern-Christmas-carols-cum-Target-commercial-jingles, but then I looked at the actual lyrics to "(EWF)TMWTB" and I decided there are just too many words, oh my head. I mean, seriously, too many words even for me. So, no redone song, except for the title. Sorry. Instead, just lots and lots of pictures, with intermittent snark.

Without further ado, I present to you EasterSwag 2009 - Part One:

Honestly, I should have known that Easter was going to be out of control when I myself had problems, well, controlling myself. A lot of that stuff was last-minute additions, except for the two wrapped presents, which were supposed to be the entirety of her Easter basket. But I needed eggs! So I bought eggs! But then I needed something to put in them! So I bought little bracelets, and crazy hair bands that can be worn as bracelets! And that silverware set was cute! And oh my God will you look at that Little People tube!

I will say this much: all that loot, and NO CANDY, except one pack of fruit snacks from the box in the kitchen that I added at the last minute, because I felt guilty about not giving her candy. What I didn't feel guilty about? Stuffing some of those plastic eggs with money from her own piggy bank. What? She didn't know she had it, so it's not like she missed it -- and it isn't like we didn't collect 10x more in change throughout the day.

We had Easter dinner at Aunt Kathy and Uncle Ed's, and as always it was wonderful. They sure do know how to throw a nice Easter dinner. Not that Cupcake even noticed, because Aunt Kathy and Uncle Ed have a real live dog:

She spent the better part of the day crawling around on the floor after poor Rosie. I hope she slept well last night. (The dog, not the kid -- the kid was conked.)

Then there was an egg hunt, which was fun but weird. Like, whoever heard of an egg hunt for one kid? But Cupcake loved it -- my Uncle "Quack" pretended to race her, and let me tell you, she's quite a scrapper for a little kid:

And what is it with my family and the concrete deer?

It's bizarre -- everyone in the family has one except me. (Guess I know what I'm getting for my birthday, huh?)

After that, we had a costume change (but no nap) and then we went to my Aunt Cyndy and Uncle Wiggy's for another egg hunt and more swag, not necessarily in that order. I'll cut to the chase and tell you that there are now approximately 538,652 Little People in my house, and Cupcake loves every single one of them the best. You can just imagine the fun I had trying to get her to go to school this morning.

Oh, yeah, and Pop-pop gave her a bike. Guess who the favorite grandparent is? (What can I say? Cupcake has excellent taste.)

And how can you enjoy pretzels and jellybeans without Aunt Shelleybeans?

We also had an Easter bunny. Aunt Cyndy and Uncle Wiggy know how to throw a party, too. Couldn't stay as long as we wanted too, because it was surpringly cold and also -- hello! no nap! we're exhausted! And we needed to make one more stop:

At my grandparents', where we had ANOTHER egg hunt, and got a pack of all-yellow M&M's in an Easter basket that was once mine, and then we had an ice cream cone for dinner. The end.

I really, really love Easter, but you'll all excuse me if I sleep until Wednesday, right?