Thank you Easter Bunny!

So, we just finished a parenting duty that's caught me by surprise in a great way.  I discovered last year that being the Easter Bunny is really really fun!  I'm not sure why I didn't expect it to be, because I love that kind of stuff, but it's just the best!  This year was even more fun because Zoe is totally clear on what is happening.  Poor thing had a terrible time getting to sleep because she was so excited. ("How is the Easter Bunny going to get up the stairs?  Oh, I know!  He'll just hop!", "How will the Easter Bunny get over our gate?  He'll hop over it?  Oh yeah, cuz he's a bunny!")  We told her the Easter Bunny (just like Santa) has magical powers and can tell the moment you go to sleep, and waits until you are to come to your house.  That, along with the fact that she took a nap in the car today resulted in an hour of attempting to fall sleep before she actually did.  She kept trying to fool Nathan into thinking she was asleep by saying "Daddy, I'm asleep now."  Somehow, Nathan was able to see through the trickery, and we waited until she was snoring away to start stuffing eggs, hiding baskets and writing treasure hunt clues.  Fun!

After we were done, we started exchanging Easter morning memories with each other and I was relating a story about a dream that one of us kids had when we were little about seeing the Easter Bunny in our house and how he tripped on a pillow while hopping down the hallway.  I remember it as a very dramatic, scarring dream (even though I'm not sure anymore if it was me who had the dream or one of my 6 siblings) for some reason and recall it every Easter.  Nathan trumped it by a thousand, though when he told me about his recurring nightmare from when he was a kid.  Apparently he dreamed (8 or 9 times) that the Easter Bunny came to his church every year to kill everyone.  He looked just like a person in a bunny costume would if they were also holding a machine gun.  No one was frightened, they just knew that he wanted them to line up youngest to oldest, and since Nathan was the youngest he knew he was going to be killed first.  So, he went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet mirror and found a box of heart shaped chocolates.  He grabbed them so he could give them to God when he saw Him.......WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT??????????????  Now, THAT is dramatic and scarring.  I feel quite sure it has something to do with his present-day outlook on religion but feel too tired to analyze it.

Anyway, we had a fun day today with our friends the May-Ostendorps.  We took a day trip to see a sculpture park they go to often in Loveland and to take a tour of the New Belgium brewery in Fort Collins.  It was pretty gray and cold but a fun day all the same...the sculpture park is really cool and pictures don't do it justice but here are a few attempts:

Wishbone

Two right feet

Then before dinner at home, we dyed Easter eggs.  For some reason, I don't like doing this but luckily, Nathan does.  I love the way they look but just don't like the process.  It most likely has something to do with heightened expectations, but feel too tired to analyze that as well.  Nathan is usually the one to rally us and get it done (along with cooking Thanksgiving dinner and decorating for Christmas...what would I do without him??) but this year I wanted to find a way to involve myself and have fun with it.  I was reminded by a couple of blogs that if you draw on the egg first with white crayon, your design shows up after you dip it so I did that (which I enjoyed).  My favorite, though was this technique I saw on Pink and Green Mama where you use a colander and food coloring and just sort of swirl it around.  Really fun and easy and I love how they came out!

Zoe put the finishing touch on all of the eggs by adding as many stickers as she possibly could to them, and just to see if she could trick the Easter Bunny, put a bunch on a clementine and put it in the egg carton along with the eggs.  Can you spot it?  :-)

Happy Easter!