The Heathen Housewife

We here at the Heathen house celebrated Easter in our own special way again this year. As a refresher for those who’ve joined me since the last time I mentioned this, the Heathen part of my blog name is semi-serious. Joe and I both grew up in religious Christian households, and now we are both…not. Still, we are used to celebrating the holidays. It’s fun to have something to look forward to, and Christmas and Easter both fall at points in the calendar that correspond so well with the natural points in the year when holidays make the most sense – getting us through the darkest part of the winter, and then pulling us through the last dregs of winter into celebrating the renewal of life and light for spring.

So we’re passing along portions of the holidays to our own family traditions. Okay, mostly it’s me passing along the stuff I remember as fun from when I was a kid, plus a few things I’ve picked up along the way. Joe just comes along for the ride.

The girls and I bought a couple of egg coloring kits again this year, only I didn’t get around to buying any white eggs – we usually get the organic free range kind, which for whatever reason are usually brown. And the thing is, the last few years when we’ve colored eggs together, they always got more fun out of splashing the coloring around on paper towels and watching it spread, so I decided we’d just do that this time. I printed out an oval template, drew some egg shapes on paper towels, and we were set.

I mixed up the colors, and a fresh cup of coffee for me…

The pink color was a real dud. Next year I need to make sure I buy a PAAS kit instead of the Dudley brand. I’d also picked up this stamper kit – it’s food coloring meant to go on eggs, but again, paper towels work just as well.

See? The girls had plenty of fun, so did I, and they managed to get their hands just as grossly stained as they would have if we were coloring eggs.

I had been planning to take it a step farther and cut the eggs out when they were dry, but we haven’t eggsactly gotten that far yet.

Finally, this week the weather started to warm up to bearable temperatures again, and the girls and I spent some time out poking around in the yard. In the photo above, they were checking out the first flowers of the season, but then that evolved into searching for pebbles to collect. Ah, the start of the season of explaining why no, you may not bring handfuls of pebbles into the house every day. Let’s put them in this nice, safe spot outside, and they’ll be waiting for you tomorrow.

Here are those flowers in question…They are right below the dryer vent from the basement. It is so sad that the only flowers we get before Easter here are the ones sparked to life by my laundry.

Saturday night, we put out the Easter baskets so the bunny could find them, and the girls wanted to add some carrots and celery, and don’t forget a glass of water for the bunny to snack on. It is awesome to have a bit of daylight back, and to have the sun still shining as we’re herding the kids up to bed.

Once the darlings were asleep, I the bunny went to work. I printed out some name tags on cardstock, then strung them on curling ribbon, from the top of the stairs, just outside the baby gate where they would see them on waking, but not start messing with them till the adults were semi-conscious.

The ribbons led down the stairs, all over the first floor – I had to make sure they’d walk past the carrots and see that the bunny had nibbled on them. Julie noticed right away and said “Look! The bunny ate the carrots and celery, but she didn’t drink the water.” There had been much debate over the last few weeks about whether the bunny was a girl or a boy, and of course my girls came to the conclusion that it must be a girl.

Sophie’s basket was hidden in plain sight, around the corner to the little entryway for the front door. Julie’s was a bit more hidden, in the storage compartment under the ottoman cushion.

I think the bunny did a good job this year – they each got a new nightgown and new set of spring pajamas, a wind-up toy, a new pack of cute undies, a little PixOs craftie kit, a very small chocolate bunny, three small foil-covered chocolate eggs, and two plastic eggs filled with jelly beans.

They were both excited about the event, but especially Julie, who seemed to be at about the same level of thrill as Christmas. Maybe more, since it was all focused on the one moment rather than spread out over a few days as Christmas is.

Poor Joe – he is not a morning person. In this picture, he wasn’t hiding from the camera the way he often does – he was rubbing his eyes trying to wake up.

The rest of the day was pretty much a candy fest. I’d portioned the candy in the basket relatively small because I wanted them to feel free to eat it as they saw fit without having to ration them. I mean, I figured let them go to town, eat it up, and be done with it rather than have them get in the habit of asking for candy. It worked out fairly well – Julie had hers pretty much gone before noon, and Sophie ate the last of her bunny right before dinner.

We also played with the PixO thing, which was kind of a hassle and didn’t turn out all that great, but they had fun.

But this…

This is how they spent most of the day – playing with the eggs out of their baskets. Julie figured out how to make a “Pull Toy” out of the ribbon and the egg, and Sophie followed suit, only she called hers a baby egg dog. You would have had to be here to believe how far that game took us through most of yesterday and on into today.

The only down side: we did suffer a bit this morning when they both woke up crazy-crabby. The blood sugar had dropped with a bang, and neither one of them could pull it together this morning. Finally, they managed to get dressed and to the breakfast table, and within about five minutes of getting some yogurt and eggs in their faces, they were smiling and reasonable once more.

Oh! and don’t let me forget to mention – at Christmas, I think I mentioned struggling with explaining some of the Christ story to the girls so they would understand at least the principles of the holiday beyond the sheer consumer frenzy. I found a book on Amazon called Meet Jesus: The Life and Lessons of a Beloved Teacher. I felt like it fit the bill perfectly, presenting the story in simple terms that I’m not sure my kids understand fully, but well enough for a start; and doing so without much judgement. It uses phrases like “some people believe…” and also talks about the lessons he taught that people of any faith can respect whether they believe in him as god or not. The girls have actually chosen it for story time on and off since we gave it to them, so I give it two thumbs up.

We also bought a book called Unitarian Universalism is a Really Long Name at the same time, and I think it’s also a good book, but maybe a little more conceptual and better for slightly older kids. Man, I really need to get motivated and get my family back to the UU church! It’s just soooo hard to drag us all out of bed and out the door on a Sunday morning, when it is so nice to sit around and drink coffee and read the paper in our pajamas till noon.

For once, I’ve got a bunch more update photos to share with you AND the energy to load them into their own seperate blog posts. So. I’m off to schedule posts for the next few days. Coming up – a newly-spun sweaters’ worth of yarn, some finished socks, some finished sweater sleeves, and a bunch of random follow-up stuff from recent comments. I hope everyone out there had a pleasant weekend, whatever you were doing.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 4:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.