Easter Madness, Part 2 - Gindi Vincent

As promised, here’s the second installment in the Easter enchilada I’ve experienced this time around with toddlers. Now that you have an intimate experience of Easter egg stuffing, let me direct you to the more Martha Stewart-y portions of the festivities.

My two closest encounters came in the form of: Easter bonnets and rice krispie treat eggs. I have a bit of Martha Stewart in me when it comes to entertaining. Before children, I was actually quite the hostess. I love stationary and spend hours designing invitations with color schemes and fonts (even now I do that with the kids party invites). I love china and collect napkin rings and appreciate my wedding crystal and linens. I do up the house for everything from my mom’s 60th birthday party to an Easter lunch. However, this all was put away when the trio arrived. (We’ll return to what this Sunday’s Easter lunch will look like momentarily.)

HOWEVER, I am not “crafty.” I do not own a hot glue gun. I do not scrapbook. I don’t even understand the crafty process. So you can imagine my head spinning when I was instructed that this Monday the kids, including the boys, had to come to school with decorated Easter bonnets to parade to chapel. I really didn’t want to be that mom that didn’t try, but I was a bit baffled about what to do. I was even more frightened when the kids’ teacher told me, “some of the moms really go all out.” So I went to Target this weekend, because I had to get pull-ups and Annie’s bunnies and did not have time for a separate trip to Michael’s, and bought hats, Easter stickers, and some silk flowers and green twiggy looking things (I figured if there were flowers on the boys hats, Bray would leave me). The stickers would not stay stuck, the flowers/twigs wouldn’t pin on, and here it was 8 pm on Sunday night before the 9 am Monday morning parade. Luckily, my same friend who was stuffing eggs with me also jumped in to help me affix items to the hats. She warily eyed the green berry twigs sprouting forth from the boys hats. She tentatively inquired, “this isn’t what you wanted is it?” I brightly answered, “yes!” Because it was. I thought they’d look like trees. Here’s the hats in the Easter parade, judge for yourself (oh, and I threw in a picture of a random kid whose mother clearly IS crafty so you can see what I was up against):

The eldest parading – front view

His hat from the back, with classmates

The baby parading – front view

His hat from the back

Little lady heading out of chapel – back hat

Little lady from the front

Ridiculous overachieving moms hats

The chapel parade (click the pics to see bigger view)

Having polished up the harrowing Easter egg stuffing and bonnet making, the following night I was confronted by a new snack challenge. For every school party the kids have had, I sign up to bring fruit: (a) it doesn’t take much time, (b) I do a pretty phenomenal homemade fruit tray (reds & greens for Christmas, etc.). Well, some mom got to the sign-up sheet SECONDS after it was activated and beat me to the fruit. Which left me with yogurt and a “treat.” I’d recently seen, and had been shown by both my assistant and mom, where you can make rice krispie treats in empty plastic eggs and then after you extricate the treat from the interior of the egg you hide M&Ms in the middle, put the top & bottom of the treat egg together, and WAALAH, the kids have a surprise in their rice krispie treat egg.

This is not physically possible. There was some intense photo shopping involved in the writing/photographing of that article. My best friend had warned me (when I called her from the grocery store to find out what the ingredients ARE to rice krispie treats – and I knew it involved rice krispies), that they were sticky and that I should use wax paper when pressing the treats into the plastic eggs. What. Ever. I had super-glue-like rice krispies stuck all over me before I even GOT to pressing them into the eggs. And then getting them OUT of the eggs. I am so sure. It came out looking like a pile of dung. So, I did what any self-respecting mother would do. I spread them out all on a tray. I pressed little pastel marshmallow ducks or bunnies or something in the middle of the squares once they were cut. Then I called them “nests.” Here’s a shot of me in action (which Bray obligingly took knowing this would make it into a post):

I’m exhausted. You probably are too. I’ll write about Easter lunch later. I’m going to rework my Easter plan next year, this is nuts.

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