The kids and I spent the week waiting for March to go out like a lamb. It felt like we were almost there but the cold wind still had a lion’s bite. We played with the snow shovels, hopefully for the last time, hacking away at the last snowbanks and throwing the chunks on the driveway.
Like a 3-2-1 coundown, we chanted, “No! More! Snow!” and flung the frozen snow onto the pavement, cathartically watching it smash. The babies imitated us by flinging smaller snowballs (usually straight up in the air or behind themselves) with calls of “So! Mah! Ohh!” parroting ours.
This was the yard at the beginning of the week. I glanced out the window and realized that the mowers were waiting to come out and play:
But after a few warm days (and our pillaging) the snow was GONE. Just in time to decorate the egg tree for the Bunny to come.
Yep my little guy on the left there just dumped out the whole bag – but that’s how we get the job done. There were a few eggs crushed under snow boots and I found the shards later, but it’s ok. They loved this activity and it’s so sweet to watch their faces as they work to bend the pipe cleaner (or as we call them now, “chenille stems,” which is why no one at the craft store ever knows what I’m looking for) around the branch.
When we finished there was a chorus of oooos and ahhhhs, and the kids exhorted me to put more eggs up high so it wouldn’t look so bottom-heavy.
My middle schooler once decorated this tree with the same gusto as the little ones today. When I asked him what he thought of it his comment was, “You’re taking that down next week, right?”
Nothing like a little pre-teen embarrassment to burst my bubble. I like my job because it lets me do little kid stuff and have a perfect excuse for it. Why wouldn’t we have eggs in our tree? I have four little girls who coo and tell me how pretty it is, and it makes their day. That’s all that matters to me. If the bus stop kids think it’s stupid I can live with that. Inside their that’s-the-dumbest-thing-I-ever-saw poses, I know they’re dreaming of chocolate bunnies.
Apologies to my non-Christian, lapsed Catholic, atheist non-capitalistic holiday crap, and other friends who recognize a variety of religions. The boys learned that the holiday was based on an ancient fertility rite, so look at the eggs on my tree in that way. And just enjoy this hard-earned beautiful spring weekend!
