Emmett's First Easter

It's Easter Monday, which is a day off for some people around here (like me) but not others (like Adam). I suspect that the holiday exists so that people have an extra day to get sugar out of their systems. Easter candy is the best holiday candy, in my opinion. I was a bit stumped at first in terms of celebrating Easter with Emmett: it's much too soon to introduce him to candy, and we're not religious. We do love animals, so I bought him yet another bunny book. This one is called My World by Margaret Wise Brown. It's supposedly a companion book to Goodnight Moon. I'd been looking for it in libraries and bookstores for a while and was having trouble finding it. I suspect that it's hard to find because it's kind of dreadful. The writing is pretty clunky. When I first bought it, I was excited to see a daddy bunny and I suppose it's worth having it in the collection so that we can further ponder the little bunny's family situation, but it's definitely not going to be one of our frequently-read bunny books.

We made up for the disappointment of My World by reading various other bunny books, but the thing that really set apart Easter from other days was Emmett's first egg hunt. I had no idea whether an egg hunt would work with him at his age, but he's been pretty good at finding things I don't want him to find so I figured there was a decent chance it would be semi-successful. He actually did pretty great with it. Lately, his favorite "toy" has been a small Tupperware-type container filled with rice (it makes a satisfying sound when shook), so it occurred to me that the eggs would be enticing if they had rice in them, too (plus it got me around the candy thing). He loved shaking the rice filled eggs! He loved somehow getting them open and getting rice everywhere! He loved trying to eat the raw rice before we could get in and clean it up! Still, some eggs stayed closed and he amused himself for a while, looking for eggs, rolling them down the hallway, going after them, and so forth.

We typically go to our friends' house on Easter and hang out during their kids' Easter egg hunt and they invited us over again this year. It was lovely. The kids were eager to show us that the Easter Bunny left bunny paw prints on the table and we speculated how and why the bunny's paws had chocolate syrup on them. It's just part of the territory of his job duties, I guess. The Easter Bunny even left a basket for Emmett at their house, which was very sweet. And useful--one of the large plastic eggs in the basket had a cute/absorbent "Hoppy Easter" bib in it. Seeing that Greta was amused by the hoppy/happy pun, Adam decided to roll out some of his favorite puns and jokes for those present, wiith about a 15% amusement rate. Emmett got to participate in his second egg hunt, where he found one egg and was pretty content to just drool all over it all afternoon. Lucydog had fun running around the yard and stealing frisbees. It was a gorgeous day outside. After a while, Chas put up the hammock and it was cute--every time I sat down in it, Lucy would come running over full speed to jump up and join me in it. Emmett was less enthralled with the hammock but I'm sure that he'll like it more as he gets older.

Holidays are just so much more fun with kids and/or pets.