Easter day dawned rainy and dark. The three little owls hunted eggs in the house... this is the way the Easter Bunny always did it when I was a kid. As a little girl, I woke up to find the eggs already hidden and the egg hunt was the very first event of the morning. I'm glad the Easter Bunny is carrying on the same tradition for my little owls. Easter baskets followed the egg hunt, and the kids oohed and ahhed over the goodies inside... candy, more candy, a few toys, and skip balls!
The kids requested a Big Breakfast (read: pancakes and bacon) so Owl Momma obliged. I did get a great picture of our fancy Easter pancakes!
The eyes and nose are craisins, the mouth is made of a pretzel, and the whiskers are bacon!We played some Easter games, read some bunny books (who knew we owned so many bunny books), and colored a giant Easter coloring mat that was taped to the floor.
By lunch time, the sun had come out, and the little owls were getting restless from too much candy. J had already given several performances of his skip-ball prowess, while K and I shouted encore and applauded. (His record is 36 skips in a row) There was not much left to do inside and it was really a beautiful day outside. So, while Owl Poppa took a much needed nap on his first day off since we-can't-remember-when, the little owls and I headed to the park to play and fly kites. We were having a great time until the fire ants took a few too many nibbles of J's feet... we left the park amid hysterical crying that calmed down when he found his candy stash in the car :) On the way home, we got to chat about cool things from when I was a little girl, like clam digging in the Chesapeake Bay and crab fishing at the Jersey Shore. The kids love to hear these kind of stories, and I love being able to share them.
By the time we got home from the park, it was dinner time. I have a thing about holiday dinners... I NEED them. This is one of those not optional things for me... I need the pageantry and formality of big raucous family get-togethers evocative of the happy memories I have of such things when I was young (though in all honesty, we were more Addams Family than Brady Bunch, but the memories are all good ones). The problem is that there is no big raucous family here. And the little family we have here is just not on board with my grandiose visions of holiday togetherness. This is not to say that they don't enjoy it or appreciate it. It's just they are a much more laid back group where holiday gatherings are concerned. Owl Poppa has never understood this holiday hang-up of mine. This has been the source of a few arguments when I am in the midst of a self-induced stress attack trying to prepare a big fancy family shindig that is catering to some deep need I have for "the perfect" family meal. In some ways, this is devastating to me, and in some ways I love him all the more for this and the new perspective it gives me (namely that things don't always have to be MY way). And it could very well just be that Easter isn't that big of a holiday to anyone but me. All of this is a prelude to the fact that we had NO family plans for Easter... no one made any, and I purposefully didn't bring it up in an effort to keep my inner Martha Stewart at bay.
My only plan was to cook a nice dinner for my own little immediate family. And I bagged that plan in favor of dinner at our favorite Tex-Mex establishment.... burritos, yum! And we had jello eggs and more candy for dessert.
NOTE: Do NOT try to make jello eggs with the regular jello recipe. There is a special egg recipe you can find here. Making jello eggs with regular jello will result in a serious leakage of jello all over the inside of your refridgerator, and your Easter Eve will be spent rinsing lime green jello out of the crisper drawer.
By 8 pm, we were all exhausted and coming down off the sugar highs. But what a great day it had been!!!!
Hope everyone out there had a great Easter, too!
Those pancakes are sooo cute! Love the ears.
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