Easter. (cue the happy music with birds chirping)The most beautiful time of the year, in my opinion. New life, warmer weather, freshness in the air, beautiful flowers, rebirth... Ahh, it's just gorgeous to me.
Time to celebrate the most significant event associated with being a Christian. Sunrise services. Easter lilies. Cute little outfits for children. (happy music comes a screeching halt)
Whoever thought of that ridiculous idea anyway? I mean, don't get me wrong. They're cute and all, but OH MY THE PRESSURE I put on myself.
You've heard about my laboring with sewing her dresses, which in the grand scheme wasn't all that much. Well, now that they're finished and still stain-free, I feel the desire welling up inside of me to vacuum-pack them away inside a Hope Chest or something so she can save them for her little girl to wear one time for a picture.
But no, that would be ridiculous. Voice-of-reason Kel says to Irrational/Emotional Kel, "let the child wear the dress to Easter, that's what you made it for, right?" Ok, Ok, Easter it is.
We managed to get out the door in time for Easter breakfast and lo and behold they're serving CHOCOLATE PANCAKES and who wants to eat those? None other than my beautiful child wearing an all-white dress!
I believe that's when my stress-level hit the ceiling and, like a spastic cat, hung on to the ceiling with all 20 claws for the rest of the morning.
Voice-of-reason Kel: "Ok, eat the chocolate pancakes, here's a bib. Daddy, make sure you help her eat and please place her gently, without rubbing, on the bench seat that is covered in 'outsideness' so it doesn't leave any marks on the seat of her dress." deep sigh and severe eye-roll
Time for the egg hunt! Oh perfect time for those adorable kid pictures reaching for eggs hidden in the grass.
Not quite. My sweet girl isn't one for new adventures so she quietly asked me to hold her hand while we searched for the 3 eggs that weren't gobbled up by the other eager beavers. No problem, egg pictures really aren't that important anyway. Doesn't she look relaxed?
The problem with the egg hunt lied in the location: the playground covered in morning dew. Nathan wasn't that excited about searching for eggs anyway, he was more interested in collecting mulch in his basket and trying to find puddles of water that had collected at the foot of every slide out there.
It didn't take much of me barking out "Get off of that" and "You can't ride that" to realize that if I wanted to salvage what might be left of these Easter outfits (so we could get some cute pictures of course) that we better leave the playground. The khaki pants were quite wet and a little dirty up to the knees on the kicking and arch-backed child that I was carefully holding away from my Easter clothes and minimal dirt got on the white dress-ed child.
Cat still hanging on to the ceiling real tight.
After setting the stressed-out-mother tone during breakfast, prying one child away from the playground and constantly telling another one they can't play on anything, what better time would it be than to take some pictures?
My first job was to get them away from the temptation and our normal parking spot up by the church just happens to be by this contraption. Don't ask me what it is, possibly some type of water hook-up for fire? Regardless, it must the the north end of a magnet and my son is the south end, because he can't keep his hands off of it. My feeble attempts at getting a cute picture of them together in their Easter clothes was trumped by this industrial prop.
No amount of whistling, calling, demanding, or enticing could get him to move away from it and to top it all off, he always insists on putting the metal chain that dangles from it in his mouth. Sweet Easter pics, Kel. I did manage to convince Katherine to stand in front of the object and this would be the best picture I could muster.
So next year, I've decided, with Daddy's full support, that we are going to show up to the breakfast and Egg hunt in all-out play clothes. Stained, mis-matching, dirty tennis shoes, pile it on. I don't care what they look like for the eating and egg-hunting part anyway. Get dirty! I might even encourage it just to make up for this year's disaster. There's some time between the egg hunt and Sunday School to clean them up anyway. I'll just bring their cute Easter clothes with us and change them there. I'm all over that. Because this attitude of "Jesus is risen but don't get dirty" just wasn't cutting it for me.
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