I have to say that I was amazed at all the free time I had last week when I took my little blog vacation. I had time to organize my recipes, alphabetize my spice rack, learn how to crochet and paint the doorway of our master bathroom that’s needed to be painted since we moved back in our house after the renovation five years ago. Not that I actually did any of those things, but I could have.
Instead I spent my time watching old episodes of “Friday Night Lights” and deciding what color I should paint my toenails for Easter. Oh, and I was also witness to a miracle that I’ll have to tell you about later this week. It wasn’t anything akin to the parting of the Red Sea or a pair of jeans that fit great for less than $39.99, but it was a miracle nonetheless.
This is the problem with not blogging for a week, I don’t know where to begin. My life has become a series of Post-it notes with random scribblings of things I would normally write about, but instead had to remember for another week. Now I’m looking at them five days later and they say things like “Nightcream? MaMaw?” and “Water bottles-cheap”, and I have no idea what my original thought process entailed.
I also found a page torn out of my journal that read, “Milk, whipped cream, butter, half & half, bacon, one pound cheese” and was relieved when I realized it was just a grocery list and not the idea for a post entitled “How to Make Sure Your Cardiologist is Your New Best Friend”.
So since I don’t know where to start, I’m going to start with Easter. Everything else can wait a few days but if I wait a week to talk about Easter, then it kind of becomes pointless.
Much like this entire post so far.
This has been one of those weekends that I hate to see end. As Caroline looked through her Easter basket this morning, I got big tears in my eyes when I realized we probably don’t have too many Easters left where she thinks a bunny sneaks into our house in the middle of the night to eat carrots and leave a basketful of cheap gifts.
She asked me yesterday how the Easter bunny gets in and I mumbled some lame answer about magic, while P interrupted me to tell her that a rabbit is like a mouse or a rat and can make itself small enough to squeeze through any kind of hole to get in the house. Except I believe he actually said, “The Easter bunny is like a rodent…”
That’s exactly the type of tender childhood memory I’m always looking to instill.
Anyway, we had a busy weekend. Caroline spent the night with Mimi and Bops on Friday night, so P and I opted for an exciting night at home complete with pizza delivery. After we ate our pizza, he went out to the backhouse to admire all his weaponry and I watched “Friday Night Lights”. Twice.
It’s hard to sustain this level of glamour and glitz, but we manage somehow.
On Saturday, we helped our church get set up for the Easter service and then spent the rest of the afternoon engaged in various egg trivia and relays with relatives. Relatives that we actually had to introduce ourselves to using our first and last name.
Did you know there was such a thing as egg trivia? Neither did I.
When we were on the way home from the egg trivia, Caroline piped up from the backseat and said, “Mama, I’m carsick.”
“What? You’re carsick?! Are you going to throw up?!”
I was totally prepared to tell P to pull the car over or to use the Easter basket as a receptacle. Desperate times.
“No, I’m just sick of being in the car. Carsick.”
We need to work on our semantics.
Here’s the snack Caroline left out for the rodent who was going to crawl through a small hole to get in our house.
Please note the perfect formation of the carrots. She informed me that it was a “tally formation”. I do believe we have gotten our money’s worth out of Kindergarten.
Normally I only let her have one chocolate candy bar for breakfast, but yesterday she stuffed about three Reeses eggs in her mouth before I knew what happened.
And, in what may have been the highlight of my day, check out the pigtails and bows.
She totally shot down any mention of wearing white sandals, but those bows were my Everest.
After a great church service, we came back to the house for Easter brunch with my family. The highlight, other than my baked french toast casserole, was a plastic wind-up chicken that poops Hubba Bubba bubblegum. Because we are a sophisticated group of people.
Speaking of sophisticated and refined, P spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning out the backhouse while Caroline claimed any item that was headed for the giveaway/trash bin.
Here she is with a sweet new hat, a nasty old mop, a chalkboard, a rusty rainbow chair and assorted cardboard boxes.
At some point I couldn’t bear to watch so I went inside to make deviled eggs out of all the superfluous hard-boiled eggs we had on hand. When I looked outside about thirty minutes later, this is what I saw.
She made this all by herself and put the whole thing together with Scotch tape.
With this type of skill she may be well on her way to becoming an architect. Or perhaps a shrimp boat away from being completely equipped to live on a beach along the Texas coast.
I’m not sure which.
Let’s go with architect.