March has always been a crazy month in my house, with three birthdays barely a week apart. When the kids were little, I nearly went crazy with baking the special cupcakes for preschool, then elementary classes; three birthday cakes in a row, the "special" decorations chosen for each child, the gifts, the wrapping... the carefully balancing everything so no one's day was more special than someone else's...
But this year, despite the fact that my children are well-past the cupcakes-for-the-classroom and Scooby-Doo-napkins-age (the youngest just turned 11, is unschooled and did in fact have balloons and streamers for her special day), I not only have the March 13, 22 and 24 birthdays to prepare for, but Easter thrown smack dab in the middle of the last two.
Now, with my youngest newly 11 and my oldest turning 20, Easter celebrations aren't quite as extravagant as they used to be, i.e. I don't have to make a bunny shaped cake and everyone knows about the Easter bunny, so secrecy is less of an issue, I still want to make the holiday special for my family.
One "tradition" - my kids are BIG on traditions! - is scattering a trail of jelly beans from each child's bed down the stairs to the dining room table where the baskets of treats reside. I don't remember exactly when I started doing this, but, well, Easter just wouldn't be Easter without the trail of jelly bean bunny-poop. This year will be a little more difficult in that regard. First, my youngest has developed the tendency to stay up until 1 or 2 a.m., making poop-scattering a very late night activity for the Easter bunny. Also, I wonder what will happen when our 6-month-old kitten discovers all those wonderfully roly-poly beans on the floor...
We've also moved past the Hershey's kisses and other relatively cheap Easter candy into the realm of Organic Fair Trade chocolate bars and locally-crafted chocolates from Stam or The Chocolate StoryBook. Granted, it's my fault for introducing the kids to chocolate that is truly worth eating, but multiply chocolate bunnies, chocolate-covered espresso beans and truffles from Stam by four and you begin to see what a huge financial investment this holiday is for me. (And that's not counting their Dad and me, who this year are both trying to lose weight... our baskets will be considerably smaller and emptier!)
Yet another tradition is homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast Easter morning. Need I say more? Right now I have Zachary's cheesecake in the oven for tomorrow, an Easter meal to prepare on Sunday, another cake to make on Monday... Of course, I can blame myself for the situation as much as the kids. One year, it may have been one of my "darker" years, I bought cinnamon rolls from a local bakery - YUCK! Even I didn't want to eat those. So, tomorrow, in the midst of playing one of Zachary's favorite 6-hour tortures (umm, I mean games), I'll need to whip up a batch of those rolls.
Let's see, what's left? Oh, we'll still decorate Easter eggs (I'll have to boil those up tomorrow as well). That's not such a big deal anymore, either, as the kids can mix the dyes and do the clean-up themselves. Oops, I just remembered that I forgot to pick up the vinegar for the egg dye - will have to run out for that tomorrow as well.
One thing that will be easier, and about which I find myself a little sad, is doing away with our traditional Easter egg hunt. Easter eve would typically find me stuffing seemingly thousands of plastic eggs with loose change, candy and stickers. DH would arise before the children, carefully side-stepping the aforementioned bunny poop, and take the bags of plastic eggs into the yard and hide them. In earlier times, this might require him to stumble out of bed as early as 6 a.m., in order to beat the rush.
We learned one year the importance of hunting for the eggs almost immediately when I noticed several squirrels in the backyard with plastic eggs between their paws. The squirrels were opening the eggs, unwrapping the Rolos within and eating them! Ever since, we hurried the kids away from their baskets after only a mouthful or two of candy and into their coats and boots (this is Iowa, you know...) and out the door to gather the eggs.
I will miss this part. I won't miss filling the eggs and I know DH won't miss hiding them. No, what I will miss is that my children are mostly young adults now and my vivid memories of the past are truly that - in the past.
So, tonight I'll wrap some gifts, prepare the special breakfast, special supper and other activities for Zachary. This is his last year at home before he leaves for college. I will make his 18th birthday special, as I have tried to do for every one of his 17 previous birthdays. We'll decorate eggs and eat cinnamon rolls on Easter. And on Monday, for Stephen's 20th birthday, I'll do all the special stuff again.
I'll treasure the new memories we'll make, relive moments of birthday's and Easter's past and savor these special things I do for my family, knowing all the while, that I'm also doing it all for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment