Sunday was Easter – I know not everyone celebrate Easter and I think due to my job I have had a hard time really celebrating the holiday as a whole. We never live to close to family so there was no traveling to have Easter dinner and since I had to work because church was my job. I have never really gotten into doing anything special. We were never invited to anyone house for Easter dinner so we would go home and just have a regular meal. This year was no exceptions – I was suppose to be alone for Easter with the kids so I had no plans on doing anything. I honestly didn’t even want to do a “basket” this year. I know as a Christian this is a very important holiday but I think on some level the idea we need to do these things because it’s what expected of us makes me not want to do it. I know that there will be someone who says “then don’t do it, because the whole meaning of Easter has nothing to do with the Easter Bunny.” I am not going to get into that logic with this post.
Now I know I’m going to pissed someone off but we don’t encourage our kids to believe in the Easter Bunny or Santa Clause. We don’t tell them they are coming with anything even though we were told that as a child. Our kids still get stuff but there isn’t this pressure we have to have it done by a certain point which played in my favor this year. I am now 30 weeks pregnant with twins and I only have so much bandwidth to get stuff done. I have let the house get out of control so the night before Easter I spent over a hour just cleaning up the house. Picking up toys, moving stuff, putting stuff away, and cleaning up the kitchen. I was done by the time I got to the dishes. This meant we would have no “baskets” waiting for them when they woke up. Come to find out our oldest who knew Easter was coming forgot about it on some level. I know this because when my husband said “Happy Easter” at the breakfast table my oldest said “It’s not Easter, yet”.
I want to be one of those moms who do special things for her kids. I have done so much special things for other people kids throughout my life that I don’t want to neglect my kids in this department. I made family breakfast and I planned to go out to the car to stuff eggs for the kids to collect. I am also the type of mom who doesn’t want junk in their baskets or inside the eggs. Tattoos, small plastic toys, and even all candy is not my cup of tea. This year we got some of those chocolate hazelnut candies because all our kids enjoy them and so do we. I also put chocolate candy coated mini eggs in the smaller eggs. Then I used my sons dinosaurs eggs he has gotten last year from his Grandmother going to McD’s on her lunch break. These are perfect because they were larger then store bought eggs – which by the way are a lot smaller than they used to be. I put in 15 different cars because we can never go wrong with cars in this house.
Anyway – before I could even make my way to the car to do this we discovered that I forgot the maple syrup on the table and our 2-year-old and 3-year-old decided it would be fun to dump the whole bottle. It was on the table, in a plate, on a chair, on the floor, and on them. I also discovered they managed to not be seen because syrup was on some toys and a blanket in the other room. I had to give the boys a bath and my husband and I tagged team to get the syrup cleaned up. Once again another $15 dollars bottle of syrup was wasted. Our 2-year-old did the same things back in the fall but he managed to keep most of it in a bowl on the counter. The bowl had old food in it that hasn’t been thrown out so saving the syrup wasn’t a choice. I didn’t know he could move the chair and get to the counter – learned that pretty quick after that moment.
That was a fun way to spend most of the morning but when I went to go put the ham that was given to us into the crock-pot I remember I needed maple syrup for the recipe. My husband had to run to the store before I could get dinner started. I am learning to just go with the flow at this point in life because I have ZERO control and I if I don’t I will lose my mind. Then this year I did not want to spend anymore money on stuff since I’m literally drowning in stuff and due to the high cost of everything we need to not spend as much as possible. I felt bad but I went into the garage to see if I could find anything that was given to me and the kids haven’t seen yet. I forgot that we brought a set of Lego’s for our oldest but due to someone giving us a ton of non-lego brand bricks I was going to try to sell it. We had this set for over a year now never taken out of the cardboard box it arrived in – and no one showed any interested. I even took 10 dollars off the price you get in the store. I decided this would be perfect for all the boys. My mom gave me a few things for my daughter and I found Little People for less than $2 dollars each a while ago. I had gotten some candy for them that I know they like and a food pouch for my daughter.
They were excited about the egg hunt and how we handle it was they got to collect the eggs. Then they had to put everything they got in a basket so they could share anything they found. This prevented them from finding most of the cars or most of the candy. I even added Paw Patrols balloons – the boys love balloons. They were fine with that solution and once they were done with the egg hunt. I showed them the picture above and they seemed to be happy. I am also finding the kids are so used to getting stuff they will play with for a few then leave it alone. I honestly don’t feel bad adding to their lego collection we will have five boys and one girl. I am pretty sure they will get used A LOT over the next decade. As you can see we didn’t do easter baskets and this may stay this way for the future. I don’t like storing them mostly because we aren’t settle in our “forever” home – I may invest at some point.
How do you handle easter baskets in your home?
What are some alternative ways you do an easter basket?
What do you provide in your kids baskets?
If money was no worries what would you give to your kids?
Last year we used Tonka dump trucks for the kids easter baskets.
Thriving in Chaos 
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