Man, we had one heck of an Easter weekend. Lots of pictures.
We started on Saturday by going to an Easter egg hunt at a local park. It was free and had been put on by a local realtor as a way to market herself. After we each got a Bag of Real Estate Literature I pretty much expected to find that each of the plastic eggs the children found would contain one of this woman’s business cards, but instead there was candy. This was the FIRST of MUCH candy to be amassed by the girls this weekend. It was soon to be a veritable horde of high fructose corn syrup.
Besides candy, though the organizer raffled off prize baskets. Sam’s number was called, and when she ran up to pick her prize she demanded through a mouth full of chocolate that she wanted the most boy-oriented basket in the lot. It contained a Spider-Man kite, a Justice League coloring book, some Batman markers, and a Batman sports bottle. The smiling realtor lady looked at Sam dubiously, but didn’t offer any further protest.
Later that afternoon Sam and Mandy added two more baskets to their sugar trove when Ger’s godmother came over to paint eggs. (Ger’s dad, who also came over, had adopted the brilliantly sensible tradition of buying the girls new spring dress shoes every year.) So we did that. Both Sam and Mandy did surprisingly well, though Mandy’s idea of a good time was slashing at the hard boiled eggs with a paint brush like some Springtime Jackson Pollack. There was much anger when we ran out of eggs, so they must have enjoyed it.
That night after the girls went to bed Geralyn and I spent a couple of hours cramming fifteen tons of ADDITIONAL candy into MORE plastic eggs. When I asked Geralyn why we had purchased these additional sweets instead of just using the cornucopia of candy they had gotten thus far, I received nothing but dirty looks and justifications involving the fact that she had ONLY BOUGHT LIKE FIVE BAGS LET IT GO, JAMIE.
Once stuffed with their corn syrup payloads these little sugar bombs were hidden around the house. The next morning the girls came down and added them to their legion of sweets one at a time, undoing our hours of work in about 13.8 seconds. They were both really pretty good at finding them –almost as good as they were at cracking them open and shoveling the contents into their maws. It was about the time I took this picture that I realized Sam was wearing, on Easter morning, her Christmas pajamas. Because, you know, nothing says Springtime and rebirth like a snowman.
Later that morning we went to Easter mass where it was incredibly crowded and the children acted terribly. Just terribly.
Finally, later that Sunday night we went to a party with Geralyn’s extended family where OH MY GOD I’M TOTALLY NOT KIDDING PEOPLE THEY GOT TWO MORE FREAKING BASKETS OF CANDY. This brought, by my estimations, their candy collection to approximately “all of it in the world.” If you round down.
Still, they had a GREAT time over the whole weekend, and it was a joy to spend it with them. They had fun every step of the way, and you can’t help picking up on that. Or eating their candy.
Yeah, I don’t think your girls got all the candy in the world, because Annalie’s got her own mountain of it here.
I learned a trick or two from my friend Bekah, who is very conscious of not wanting to pay exorbitant dental bills for her kids. I follow her example now, and I put candy in some eggs, but I don’t fill them–maybe 2-3 jellybeans per egg, or one Hershey’s Kiss–and many of the eggs contain goldfish crackers or sugarfree gum or stickers or even money.
It looks like you guys had great weather for Easter!
Yeah, we kind of tried to stick to that, but eventually you’re like “Oh, crap, we’re running out of eggs we’d better start cramming like six peanut butter cups in there!”
I like the money idea, though.
“For the hooooorrrrrde!”