Have you ever thought,” OMG! Not another holiday where kids get hopped up on candy and get more stuff!”? I introduce to you: The Family Easter basket!
See, about a year ago, I noticed that I had lost my fun. Has that ever happened to you? You wake up one day and realize you have just been going through the motions of your daily life. Not sad or unhappy, but not really happy either. I don’t know where it went or how long ago I had lost it, but I didn’t want to go through life just living. I felt like I owed it to my kids to give them the gift of fun. I felt I owed it to myself. So all last summer I tried. We did bonfires, family movie nights, but I still couldn’t find my fun. The kids noticed it, too. “It seems like we used to have more fun.” My daughter said one day, “Where the heck did it go?”
Christmas rolled around and it was hard to even get into the spirt. The kids were very “Meh” about decorating. We made ornaments, but didn’t get around to hanging up our stockings. It was just a blah year. I was thinking about how to fix this conundrum, when I remembered something I had seen in the fall. Easter basket ideas. More specifically THE FAMILY EASTER BASKET idea. I loved the idea right off the bat and knew what had to be done. I was going to make “The Summer of Fun Easter Basket”. Google and I started planning our summer of fun. I would enter in “Different fun summer activities” and Google would give me it’s very best ideas. Slowly, even though I hadn’t GIVEN the kids their Easter goodies yet I felt the fun coming back. I was present. The fun was contagious. It started slowly oozing on over to the kids. This was going to work.
One thing I realized is I put too much on my plate. I mean, I’m a single parent. I am outnumbered three to one. I work PLUS we have our little urban farm. In the spring we are bursting at the seams with babies and doing garden prep. All of this is placed on top of end of year IEP meetings and concerts, talking kids through the stress of end of year tests and the normal antsy feeling that they get when the end of the school year is looming ahead of them. Because I feel like I have to make the most special memories for the kids. We make homemade chocolate Easter eggs stuffed with homemade marshmallow and lemon curd. Last year I even wove Haley her own Easter basket for Pete’s sake. I made the decision to simplify our holiday. The kids still got their homemade candies, including the chocolate Easter eggs, but I took short cuts to simplify the process. Homemade marshmallows are AMAZING, but purchased marshmallow fluff makes life easier and tastes just as good in our chocolate eggs. No homemade woven Easter baskets were to be had and just because I CAN make the noodles for our pasta salad from scratch doesn’t mean it needed to be. Did I mention Amazon? Amazon along with Amazon Prime happened. Like in January. You heard me right. I bought my Easter goodies during all the after Christmas sales.
The night before Easter I literally stayed up most of the night cleaning my house so that it doesn’t look like people live here. I don’t know why. We don’t have Easter company. It just makes the actual day less stressful. Probably because I am too tired to care about the fact that the kids are sugar fueled maniacs. I hid all the eggs, inside and out. Then I got all the goodies out of the trunk. No more baby summer toys for my big kids. I admit it. I went crazy. I am not a big fan of making Easter into another Christmas, but we were in search of our fun remember? There was lawn bowling and giant yard tumbling tower blocks, a projector for movies outside by the bonfire and a giant net with giant balls and rackets. Puzzles for rainy days. Last but not least the crème de le résistance, the big purchase, laser tag guns. I started looking at them at around Christmas time and was lucky enough to grab them on sale back in January. They were hidden ALL this time. They were going to love them.
After I got everything all set and got ready for bed I realized I had to sleep on the couch…. Because there were Easter eggs “hidden” on my stairs, but that was fine. It gave me the view of seeing each kids face when they took a look at our basket of summer fun. There it was. We found our fun. It was in a bright pink baby pool that the ducks are going to take over as soon as it has water in it, snuggled in besides the chocolate bunnies. We played all the games, we broke out the laser tag guns and ran around as a family. Even my “to cool to be seen with her family” almost 15-year-old was running around like a fool. She took everyone down with her laser tag skills. While cleaning up the kitchen she told me. “This is what we have needed. Today was pretty much perfect.” And she was right.
UrbanFarmingMom 