How Not To Do Easter My Way

I'm back. Thanks for all the wonderful comments while I was gone, they made me smile. The grounding was very good for me, I got a lot done, I worked very hard, and yet.... And yet my house still has the Monday morning haven't-cleaned-in-weeks-and-has-been-ransacked-by-an-army-of-small-demons look to it. Ah well, at least this time I can say that it wasn't because of me. You may remember my posts on how to have a lovely and a peaceful Easter? Well, great game plans only work if everyone follows the plan. This year we all deviated enough to cause total mayhem. I won't go into too many details but here are some of the main bullet points:

1. Don't allow your daughter to have a friend sleepover Friday night, forgetting that on Saturday you do your egg hunt. This is because said friend will turn your eldest child into a giggling mass of bad decisions, they will stay up and keep you up WAY too late on a pregnant holiday eve and make us all so tired that Mr. Easter Bunny sleeps in the next day, you won't have an Easter basket for the friend and you will have to scrounge around to make one for her, friend will start an egg fight that your kids will fully participate in despite all their upbringing and you won't be left with any eggs for deviled eggs, and in the 7 minutes that you step inside all the candy, playdough, eggs, toys, etc that you purchased, packaged, hid, and were excited about will be torn apart and strewn on the lawn and kids will be crying because they suddenly realize that they have ruined their stuff and are getting hit in the head with eggs, and because the friend won't even say, "Thank you for letting me ruin your holiday" as she heads out your door.

2. Don't schedule events for March 22nd, this coming Saturday, and the day before Easter unless your brain knows that they are all the same day because then you will be WAY over booked during a pregnant holiday.

3. Next Easter I am going to wash underwear, socks, and clothing for church and a nice non church outfit for every kid, then I will wrap them in waterproof plastic and lock them into a safe so that, despite all my hard work and my utter fatigue, I won't be found doing what I was doing Sunday morning. Lets just say that it was the kind of day that makes me say (in a tizzy and ready to cry as I hand my two sons a grey and blue pair and a green and brown pair, "Here, and if anyone asks you why your socks don't match you just tell them that we do this on purpose for Easter."

4. Don't think you are on the freeway heading home at 9:30 at night unless you are SURE you are on the freeway heading home. Loosing a whole hour because you find yourself on some mountainous divided highway in the dark is not a good way to spend an evening and it will suck up the precious hour you were going to spend making food for Easter Sunday. (Thank heavens for cell phones and yahoo maps, and husbands who can guide you back home)

5. Don't spend precious time on Saturday cleaning before you leave for the rest of the day. Instead spend that time cooking. Because you know that if you leave your husband and the three youngest kids at home, on a candy high no less, for 7 hours, that the house will in no way be as clean as you left it.

Luckily, a dear friend had us over for dinner with some other dear friends of ours and the day ended perfectly, with good food, laughing children, and a smiling, tired, pregnant, me.

I hope you all had a Happy Easter!

Messy Messy Messy

I am loving Scribbit's Winter Bazaar and all the fun things that people are coming up with.

My contribution for today is "Messy, messy, messy" eggs. Or felt fried eggs. You will need a plastic egg, some white and yellow felt, scissors, thread, a pinch of stuffing, some pins, and something round (hence the bottle of paint).






Fold your white felt and cut out two fried egg shaped blobs. Trace a small circle onto your yellow felt and cut it out.








Blanket stitch (or regular stitch, I just think the blanket stitch is pretty) the yellow circle onto one of the white blobs. Before you come full circle, shove a pinch of stuffing into the yellow circle and then stitch shut. Now place the two white blobs together and blanket stitch around. (I stitched my whites together first and it made sewing the yellow circle on more difficult).




Now your kids can crack eggs on your kitchen floor all day long while repeating the famous line from Frosty The Snowman, "Messy, messy, messy," until you go a bit batty. My daughter got one of these for Christmas and I'm not kidding about going batty.




I'm going to make one of these for every kid and hide them with the rest of the Easter eggs. If I were industrious like Scribbit I would have made a bunch of them and offer to sell them to you but I'm too busy eating my new ice cream to be that cool.

Oh, and if you happen to have, or can get your hands on those thick round magnets you can use them in your yolk so the egg can do double duty as a fridge magnet. The magnet also helps the eggs fall from the egg shell better (more like a real egg).

"Easter" Done My Way

Yesterday I posted about how I've made Easter Egg hunts more peaceful. Today I will give you all my other "Easter" secrets.

1. "Yucky Eggs": Stepping gingerly through the grass, shoulders hunched in concentration, eyes searching high and low, the children comb the lawn with baskets in hand looking for Easter eggs. "WAIT JUST A MINUTE!!! How come you guys aren't picking up the real Easter eggs???"
"Because we only like the ones wif candy in 'em."
"You pick up the real eggs right now or I'm going to take all the candy ones away!"
Oh yeah, I totally know how to ruin a fun time.
It totally bugs me that my kids are so spoiled that they refuse to pick up the real eggs. I'm sorry, but we just spent a big messy evening dying those things, DSSH spent half an hour hiding them, and I really want my deviled eggs with dinner tonight but I'll be darned if I'm gonna go traipsing through the wet cold grass to pick them up. So this is what I do now. I trade egg finding hints for real eggs. Yup, DSSH makes sure to hide the really good plastic eggs in obnoxiously hard spots and the kids can only get hints in return for a hard boiled egg. I sit on the deck (eating my Easter candy) and collect them all. This also helps keep the eggs from being smashed before I can get them. They are always out in plain view too. Other tricks I've seen for this problem are giving a small toy in trade for an egg, having clues written on the eggs, or simply getting rid of any candy eggs whatsoever (YEAH RIGHT!).

2. Just Say, "No," To Grass: Easter basket grass, that is. Can't stand the stuff. It is useless, messy, clogs vacuums, I'm sure it chokes squirrels and birds, and I know for a fact that the landfills don't need it. Why is it even still legal? Instead I do what my mom always did. I go out and buy myself some new kitchen or bathroom towels and use them to pad our Easter baskets. Sure, they get a bit dirty but then that is their purpose anyway, and then I have something useful in the end. I've also done personalized handkerchiefs for each kid that they can use later.

3. Year Round Easter Baskets: We did the cute little Easter Basket thing for several years, we even made our own out of garbage (some on once said this is the stupidest thing you can do because then the item is no longer recycleable). After years of cleaning, storing, finding, mending, and buying a basket that only gets used once a year I finally got wise. Now we use buckets or baskets that we can use every day. I use Easter as the time to buy new beach buckets (if needed), new organizing baskets, new beach bags, etc... Anything with handles that needs to be replaced that year gets bought and used as an Easter basket first. Sometimes we spiffy them up with ribbons or stickers. This year I got the kids new beach buckets with shovels (though not as cute as the ones I have pictures here).

4. Easter Vs. The Bunny: I've often had that common concern about having such an important spiritual holiday commercialized and paganized. I'm mean, honestly, how can you possibly give a 4 year old a basket of candy and then ask them to think about Jesus? I'm sorry, it is just a cruel expectation. I know that many others have done this but it was a totally new idea to me when I first heard of it so I will explain what we do to remedy the situation. We have simply separated our Spring celebrations from our Easter celebration. One family I know does this by celebrating spring (eggs, candy, bunnies, etc) on the first day of Spring, and Easter on Easter Sunday. I would love to do it this way but my husband likes to do it the way we do it now. We celebrate Spring on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. This way we have all day to play on Saturday, no sugar highs in church the next day (or at least no fresh sugar highs), and we can completely focus on the real reason for Easter. We talk about the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the atonement, we watch movies on this subject, and all of our activities have to do with this all important event. Next week I will post some of the ways that we celebrate Easter and not Spring.

Whine-Free Egg Hunt

For great winter and holiday ideas check out the participating posts at Scribbit's Winter Bazaar.

"Mooooom, Cookie is getting all the eggs and she won't give any to me."

"Cookie, you are only supposed to find the ones that aren't on the ground."

"I know mom, but he keeps walking right past them."

"Pablo, that was an easy egg, you are supposed to leave those for Sweet Terror to pick up."

"But, mooooom, she's not even looking. She is just sitting over there eating jelly beans."

Sweet Terror, after eating her jelly beans, screams in an ear splitting shriek as Monster Man snatches an egg right by her foot.

"Monster Man!"

"Sooooory. Here, Sweet Terror."

She grabs the egg and promptly sits down to eat its contents. Then Monster Man start complaining that she didn't say, "Thank you."

My eyes have rolled so many times at this point that they hurt. I need a whistle and referee shirt to play this game. Two years ago, after getting so disgusted with my children and the whole Easter Egg Hunt drama that I almost canceled Easter, I had an idea. This idea has completely changed our egg hunts and have made for a fun, peaceful hunt. What is my miracle trick? Color coded Easter egg hunt. We buy several bags of the colored plastic Easter eggs and fill each color with an equal amount of candy and little things like chapstick, a wind-up toy, etc. Now, each kid gets assigned a color

Cookie=Purple

Pablo=Blue

Monster Man=Green

Sweet Terror=Pink

Mom=Yellow

Dad=Orange (or whatever color is left)

Now, not only does this guarantee that everyone gets an equal amount of eggs, and that no one gets an egg unfairly snatched from them, but it also makes the whole hiding thing a lot easier for the Easter Bunny and more fun for the kids too. Depending on the age of the child, certain colored eggs get hid at different difficulty levels. Sweet Terror's pink eggs are just thrown on the grass in plain site, and not even that far from each other, while Cookie's get hid up in trees and under things and are in every far reaching corner of our lot. I like to put special things in DSSH's eggs and hide them throughout the house, with a difficult clue in each egg to help him find the next one. DSSH loves me and so he just puts my eggs in a basket on the table so that I can eat them while taking pictures of everyone else. =)

I gotta tell ya, this has made Egg Hunts with toddlers SOOOOOO nice. Tune in tomorrow and I will tell you how I get the kids to pick up the hard boiled eggs too (Yes, my kids are so spoiled that they refuse to pick up the real "yucky" eggs so they have more time to find the candy filled ones).