Easter Things

One minute you're sharing a chair with one of your children, pretending to watch Stampy's Minecraft Easter Special, but really just breathing in the scent of his head, which smells faintly, unbelievably the way it did when he was a baby, sort of warm and sweet, kind of like a beeswax candle, but not at all, really, a smell as indescribable as it is unreplicable, despite the best efforts of baby lotion manufacturers. You remember the way you used to take small, surreptitious licks of his and his brother's head, like a cat, dabbing your tongue on the peach skin of his loose and fuzzy scalp, hoping to put a taste to the smell, but finding that the aroma stands on its own.

An hour or two later, or perhaps the next morning, you're threatening to cancel the Easter Bunny, because the child with the fleetingly baby-scented head and his twin brother just. won't. listen.

Of course you don't mean it, really. And they know that. You haven't cancelled a single Christmas or birthday yet, despite innumerable threats of the same.

You all three manage to get the house reasonably clean and haul up the and distribute the Easter decorations, because it is the day before Easter and you really can't put it off any longer.

And the children with the honeydew scalps pick up a basket of wooden eggs that they painted with a relative years ago and take turns hiding them around the house for each other and finding them. They don't put on the rabbit suit, which they wore for this activity year after year after year, until the leg cuffs of the costume barely reached their knees. And you miss the rabbit suit, a little, but you also revel in the wonder of two big boys finding joy in hiding and finding eggs--until they don't, until some unspoken rule of the game has been violated, and childlike play turns into shouting and they move on.


Later, one of those children, who saw his big brother snooping in the Easter candy which you had placed on the highest high shelf in the kitchen, tells you he thinks the Easter bunny brings some of the candy, but that parents help with the rest of it. They had argued hard against the possibility of Santa Claus and, though your only response had been, "Santa only brings presents to those who believe in him," you had expected that they were convinced by their own arguments. You marvel at the capacity of children to hang onto wonder, to believe in magic despite all evidence to the contrary.


The next day, after egg hunts and jelly beans and too many sweet breads and your idea of Easter dinner, which does not involve a ham, you pull out the Easter books and read to these children who no longer clamor for a story, who don't disdain picture books, necessarily, but who show no interest in them. You start with Jan Brett's Easter Egg, which has lovely pictures but a kind of vapid, in your opinion, story, and follow it up with The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, a story so ahead of its time--feminist and populist and egalitarian--a story, you think, that if every child read it every Easter, you might live in a world with fewer fanatics and racists and misogynists in positions of power, where everyone is as wise and kind as Old Grandfather Bunny.

April Knit ~ Lambykin

I'm not even sure when I started this project. I tried to find evidence on my blog, to no avail I do know that nearly four years ago, I bought a drop spindle kit at The Fiber Frolic. Perhaps I tried it out right away, spinning a small skein of knobbly white wool, or perhaps I put it off for a winter's day later that year. And then, last Christmas, or the Christmas before, when E was showing a lot of interest in knitting, I bought him A First Book of Knitting for Children. He wasn't too interested in trying out any of the projects, but somehow it was decided that I would knit the lamb (aka lambykin) using that knobbly handspun white wool, for Easter last year (or maybe it was the year before). 

But then I ran out of wool halfway through and so the project sat for a year (or maybe two), waiting for me to buy more white roving and spin it and finish the poor lambykin, who we all but forgot about until last week, when E reminded me about him and pulled out the drop spindle and spun some more knobbly not good for much of anything but a lambykin yarn and finished knitting him up Saturday night.

He's pretty silly-looking and can't stand on his own, but he's soft and squishy. I realize now that this is really a baby toy and has no practical purpose in a household where the youngest members are nearly ten years old (of course the first thing E did was hold its front and back legs like a machine gun at the Easter breakfast table. Of course. 

I think I might make more of them for babies I know, using real yarn of a uniform thickness, because the more I look at him, the more he grows on me. As for spinning, I don't think it's going to be a regular hobby for me. It requires too much patience, attention to detail, ahem, skill. I'm more of a slap-dash kind of gal. Or maybe I just need to take a lesson a do a little more practice.

Weekend Things ~ Still Winter

This is what it looks like where I live right now, at the tail-end of March.

Snowy and muddy and very much still winter.

I was supposed to go to Vermont for the weekend to visit a friend and her new(ish) baby, but I came down with a cold and didn't want to go coughing all over my friend's baby.

Vermont wouldn't have been much of an improvement in climate, but it would have been away, which is something I've been needing lately.

As it turned out, the kids were gone for most the weekend, so it was almost like a vacation, at least from other people's needs.

I found myself in a nearly empty house with a lot of free time, which is a state I dream about but rarely experience, yet I couldn't settle down to do anything.

Whatever powers the perpetual motion that propels me through winter seems to have run out of fuel.

I spent a fair amount of time working on my final project for my naturalist class. I was pretty excited by this turtle for about a minute after I finished it, and then my mind spun into the abyss of "my drawings are so flat I don't understand perspective and they have no character and this is going to be the worst project ever."

It was time to get outside. 

A walk to the (starting to break up) river, and some time just lying around doing absolutely nothing, followed by a little reading and daydreaming helped. Funny how hard it is to do nothing.

When E and Z got home Sunday afternoon, we did a little half-hearted Easter decorating.

It's kind of hard to get in the Easter spirit with snow still so deep I sank up over my knees when I went off trail.

We didn't have any wheat berries for starting Easter grass and no one even dressed up in the bunny costume and hid eggs.

Easter

We were treated to three days of almost sixty-degree weather last weekend, which almost made winter feel like a distant memory. Saturday the boys spent all day outside, making syrup, while I burrowed down with my homework (I just sent my draft essay––three times longer than it needed to be––off to my mentor, so I'm looking forward to a weekend of catching up with neglected friends and housework!). I took one little break and snuck down to the river, where I was rewarded with the sight of a beaver sliding into the water and trying to swim upstream against the strong snowmelt current (I didn't have my camera!). 

As usual, we got to around to egg-dyeing last-minute, after dinner Saturday night.

E and Z were so excited to hunt for eggs Sunday morning...I love that they're still excited about sweet simple things like that (especially when they keep trying to trick me into confessing that I'm the Easter Bunny).

I got them each one of these jump ropes, which I confess I only bought because of the pretty rainbow colors, but they are indeed very good jump ropes––flexible and just the right weight and length, much nicer than the plastic ones they get for free from "Jump Rope for Heart." And, I got a bonus fourth jump rope, having won a giveaway on My Bit of Earth, so I upgraded to a double rope, and now the three of them can practice cooperating (ahem).

For breakfast, I made these vegan Tropical Lemon Cranberry Coconut Chia Bars the night before, and fruit salad, and, of course, hard-boiled eggs (hey, I said I was going to be flexible with this plant-based thing). I love lemony things on Easter, for some reason (must be all those years my mom made lemon merengue pie), and these were perfect, tart, not too sweet, and full of lots of healthy things to counter-balance all those jelly beans.

After much coaxing, I finally got the troops onto the trail, and we headed down to the river, 

Which is almost ice-free.

Z, M and I bushwhacked our way downstream to the grassy meander area, probably our last chance to do so without getting covered in ticks.

Just a tiny bit of snow remains in the woods (and we didn't even get our usual April Fool's Day snowstorm!).

For Easter dinner, we went to C's dad's house. I brought this vegan version of spanikopita, which I like even better than the traditional feta cheese version I usually make. It had great texture and lots of complex flavor with the olives and artichokes. I might add more spinach next time––it's amazing how much a whole pound of spinach shrinks down when you cook it. For dessert, i brought these Zingy Lemon Custard Bars, which were so lemony-tart and delicious. I liked them even better than lemon merengue pie and regular lemon bars, and will definitely make them again, although next time, I'll make the graham crackers into an actual crust (maybe using coconut oil?) and spread the whole thing out in a larger pan, so the bars are thinner and might firm up better (it did end up being more like lemon-graham-cracker slop on a plate, but such good slop!). The best part about taking vegan and tofu-containing foods to a dinner is that no one else wants to try them, so there was plenty of both left over for me.

Hope spring is finding its way to your corner of the world!