A Weekend Recap...

I hope you all had an enjoyable and peace-filled Easter weekend. Ours was lovely: just the right amount of busy activity and relaxing downtime. We started the weekend off by attending an Easter "fair" of sorts: complete with a bunny petting zoo, horse-pulled wagon rides, lots of food, games, and face painting (which both of my children refused to have done...I'm not sure why. But the mere suggestion of such brought my daughter to near tears. I guess some kids are afraid of clowns and some have an irrational fear of face painting. Go figure.)

Here is my daughter holding one of the precious baby bunnies they had there. Don't let her serious look fool you, she was on cloud 9 holding that little bun. The fur was like velvet. It's been a long time since I held a rabbit, but I have no recollection of them being that soft. So, so sweet (and so, so tolerant...being passed from child to child a dozen times or more in the 20 minutes we sat in the petting area).

And, of course, no Easter community event would be complete without an Easter egg hunt (or as my daughter kept calling it, an "Easter Bunny hunt"). Before the start of the hunt, she was a little nervous. I wouldn't have been surprised if she had decided she didn't want to go along with it. But, I was so proud of her: she bolted past the other children and went straight to the top of the hill, snatching up as many eggs as she could. Fortunately, my little competitor knew that it wasn't all about "winning" (I saw her give a couple of her eggs to some of the little ones whose baskets were nearly empty). And yes, she is wearing her winter coat and her fleece hat with the ear flaps. We had snow flurries that day, believe it or not. Not the traditional garb for an Easter egg hunt, but there you go.

I really try to avoid the cheap junk at the holidays. I don't see any point filling baskets (or stockings, at Christmas) with stuff I'm going to toss a few days later, just for the sake of making their baskets look "full." So, this year I went with several animal figurines (both wooden and by Schleich), new paintbrushes and watercolors, kitchen gadgets (my little ones love using real measuring spoons, sifters, whisks, basters, etc. to play in flour, sand, and water), and books. I read about the book Zoe and the Fawn on this blog, and knew it would be perfect, what with all the deer we see each day around our yard. Never mind that the shipping (from Canada) cost more than the book itself!

I ended up lining each child's Easter basket with fabric chosen expressly for them (which I will turn into summer outfits, I hope). We attempted to grow our own live Easter grass this year, but on Day 8 (after sowing our grass seeds) Rascal pulled one of the baskets off the windowsill. Wet potting soil and seeds everywhere. Then on Day 11, he proceeded to pull the second basket off the windowsill. Repeat the whole wet-soil-and-grass-seeds-everywhere scenario (complete with much exasperation and grumbling on my behalf). One might be wondering why I didn't move the location of the second basket before its demise. Well, hope springs eternal, I guess. Or maybe it was just laziness. I thought for sure after he witnessed my reaction (overreaction?) to the first basket tipping episode, he wouldn't dare yank another basket off the sill. I was wrong. Regardless, the fabric-lined baskets served their intended purpose (and maybe I've even started a new tradition: a sneak-peak at a future dress/shirt/shorts/jumper or what have you for the warmer months ahead).

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