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.

On the Waterfront

On Sunday it was a nice day, clear and cool but not uncomfortable, one of the few days we've had in the last three weeks or so when they weren't calling for rain, so when Shae said she was bored with her movies and wanted to go play outside, we were happy to oblige. We filled a baggie with crunched up stale potato chips and pretzels, counted that as housecleaning for the day, and headed to the park.

I didn't comb her hair out that day, and she was supposed to get a bath that night, so since it was already 4:00 in the afternoon, I decided to cover her Wookkiee-head with a bandanna. Yes, it's lazy and ghetto. No, I don't particularly care, because I really think it's easier to just ignore the problem until it goes away (i.e., she is old enough to comb out her own damn tangles).

Right now Shae is really into yellow flowers, even though she recently announced that she doesn't like yellow any more and her new favorite color is purple. All yellow flowers everywhere are "daffodils" to her -- actual daffodils, sure, but also dandelions, forsythia, and whatever these yellow weedy things are that are growing all over the park. She's going to lose her mind when the strawberry runners that we're passing off as a "lawn" start blossoming and there are yellow "daffodils" (and teensy little baby strawberries) all over the yard.

It turns out she wasn't feeling very well that day, so we had to take a lot of "breaks" on our little walk around the park. When we told her to keep going and she didn't want to -- which was often -- she just copped a squat wherever. Four-year-olds. The less said about that, the better.

Or we carried her, which was clearly more fun for some of us than for others. She's getting so tall now that when she sits on my husband's shoulders -- he's 6'2" -- I worry a little bit that she's up where the air is thin and she isn't getting enough oxygen.

We didn't feed many ducks. The creek was running pretty fast and muddy and the ducks were paddling pretty furiously just to stay in the same place, and I guess they don't like stale potato chips and pretzels, because they didn't eat anything we threw at them. Maybe next time, if there is a next time -- it's been raining mice and frogs or whatever, and I don't know how long this is going to go on, but they're calling for rain for like seven out of the next ten days, including Easter. So I'm glad we ducked outside when we had the chance.