While I still believe a case can be made for reusing Easter basket grass each year, I’ve recently learned that this is absolutely NOT true for reusing chocolate.
Imagine the volume of questions Dave must have been dying to ask when J opened his treat, and then looked up at us, immediately crestfallen by this powdery mass of chocolate dust that disintegrated upon being touched. Luckily for me, Dave has my 6 (“for better or worse” comes to mind) and quickly reminded all of us that the Easter Bunny takes care of a LOT of people and manages a LOT of varied preferences and is probably very busy at work lately and can sometimes make mistakes, too.
When I was little, my siblings and I had generously-sized Easter baskets, but my younger brother’s put the rest of ours to shame. It was both long and wide, and shallow, so it looked like a small boat floating on the carpet of our living room. I admit I had some basket envy until my mom once mentioned that the problem with his enormous basket was — in her efforts to divide all the basket contents equally — his never looked full.
For whatever reason, this is one of those off-hand remarks made by a parent that sticks with you, so when I picked out baskets for my own children many years later, I pointedly opted for relatively small sizes.
What makes the cut in our small baskets?
Every year:
- Astronaut ice cream (no seasonal significance, but a tradition nonetheless).
- A few sweets.
- A token gift – usually something related to the warming weather and more time spent outside. This year: gallons of bubble juice refills. Last year: kids binoculars for outside adventures. The year before: a water table to compensate for being in the thick of COVID lock-downs and desperately needing new ways to entertain them for extended periods.
- The same Easter grass as last year (is this cheap? Or just not wasteful? Jury is out).
And, of course, for C who neither consumes sweets nor needs any new amusement given the over-abundance of hand-me-down toys in our home, an assortment of his favorite Puffs and Yogurt Melts.
For the record, 2 of my favorite Easter basket memories growing up were when I got the Beatles White Album in my basket during high school, and when my mom filled our baskets as adults with fancy cheese, crackers, meats, and a bottle of wine.
From our home, which I thought had a set number of hidden eggs in it as of this morning, but found out when the boys exceeded that number that Dave hid an additional (amount unknown) set from the grandparents… Happy Easter. If you visit in the coming weeks and find an egg, there will be a cash reward.
We got our eggs colored this year just under the wire, with only 5 eggs broken in the process, minimal bickering about who had access to which color, and just one expletive-riddled sigh after the boys ran off to play and Dave thought the spilled liquid may have permanently stained our new countertop (for the sake of the holiday, I’m glad to say it did not).
But now the boys are in bed and I am left to reflect on something that has puzzled me since becoming a parent:
All those years with me and my siblings as little kids, when we’d wake up on Easter Sunday and peer from the upstairs hallway down into the living room, excitedly pointing out where we could spot the brightly colored eggs stashed around the room… how did my parents pull that off?
Did they set their alarm for the wee hours as we still slept, creep around hiding our (5 x dozen) colored eggs, and then go back to bed, only to have us wake them shortly thereafter to go find said eggs? Surely they wouldn’t have hid them before going to bed, otherwise they’d be left out an extended period and are, in fact, a food very much at risk of going bad when left out. But – also surely – my parents are not the type of people to voluntarily forgo sleep for anything frivolous, as evinced by the fact that they were known to set all of the clocks in the house back 1 hour on Christmas Eve so that they could sleep 1 additional hour before we were allowed to wake them at “9am.” (Aside: no wonder those Christmas mornings felt torturously long as we played cards in my sister’s room and anxiously watched the clock.)
Evidently some people skirt the issue by hiding plastic eggs instead, but then why do they color all of those hard boiled eggs? In a plastic egg family, what does one do with all those hard boiled eggs? Is the journey the destination, whereby the activity is simply to color them, and then into the refrigerator they go until they’re relegated to your dad’s breakfast for the next 7 consecutive days? If so, it seems an awfully anti-climactic end given the emphasis and tradition around the coloring event itself.
Suffice it to say, I am perennially stumped and will sadly be setting my alarm for 4:30am tomorrow in hopes that I can hide the hard boiled eggs and catch another hour of sleep before A bursts in, loudly asking to watch his recent favorite series, Helper Cars.
Last night, I attended an industry event honoring one of my clients. It was energizing in a way I never thought I’d describe a night spent away from my family, with competitive platform reps, banquet chicken, and cash bars. But the live speeches! Standing ovations! Small talk and lingering goodbyes! I was in my professional happy place.
And then the icing on the cake: the honoree gave career advice that was so thought-provoking that I paused to physically take note.
She told the story of her winding career following an impromptu move to the bay area, applying to a job that she knew nothing about other than it “sounded like a good fit for a creative,” being rejected and then bumped by HR to a different role that sounded “pretty cool, too” to her 22 year old self, and then an illustrious career with long stints in the employment of a handful of globally-recognized brand names. She never chased a specific role or level or scope, but nevertheless accrued an amazing reputation (see: ballroom filled with adoring fans) for her work, her working style, and her impact in the community. She explained some of this by following her passions while remaining authentic to herself, but also by tapping directly into the people around her with the following questions:
- What do you come to me for?
- When have you seen me happiest?
- What am I better at than my peers?
As someone who is a firm believer in the Strengths Finder philosophy, I found this suggestion useful, actionable, and very likely to yield illuminating results. Rather than feel that you need to all of the introspection alone, you can lean on the perspectives of people who can vouch more objectively for how you actually show up in terms of performance and strengths.
So there you have it. A new perspective on how to scope my next career moves, and the realization that I grossly underestimated the cost of a cash bar in a big city. Not bad for life lessons on a Thursday night.
- But really, there’s a market for this.
- The Mysterious Origins of the Phrase ‘The Whole Nine Yards.’ Spoiler: an unsatisfying ending.
- My daily abbreviation count has increased exponentially since being back at work: “sg,” “ty,” “iirc,” “wrt,” “afaik,” “lmk,” “wdyt,” & on & on… I joked with a colleague that my pings were becoming almost unintelligible unless you were fluent in corp-speak. He sent me this.
- I am so glad to know I’m not the only one who has felt this:
There have been a few occasions recently when I learned of people going through a challenging life event — the kind of event that will result in them measuring time as “before” or “after” it happened. It’s intimidating to know what to say in those situations, and humbling to know that there is nothing you can realistically do to materially help assuage their pain.
That said, and while I won’t claim to be any kind of an expert, I do think I’ve stumbled into some practices that have worked:
- Put it in writing.
I always reach out via email or text as a first pass. This serves several functions:
A) It gives you time to craft the right tone, which can feel clunky in sensitive situations.
B) You can explicitly state that they do not need to respond to you at all if they’re not up to it.
C) Because it’s not live or in real-time, they don’t need to “perform” a reaction for you (including appreciation for your outreach). They can focus on what you mean to convey, which is to… - Suggest specific ways you can help.
None of these “let me know how I can help” banalities — give them a “menu” of pre-vetted ideas and make it easy for them to green-light things, and get the ball rolling that way.
Examples:
A) Sending care packages of activities for kids – either to buy their parents a little time to mentally breathe, or simply give them something novel to do during the sometimes torturous waiting period. I love the “mess free” coloring kits or epic bubble bath supplies for this one.
B) Ordering an Instacart delivery of groceries, or DoorDashing dinner on set days of the week so they can remove the mental load of meal planning or stopping at the store amidst the early stages of adjusting to a new trauma.
C) Offering to come let the dog out periodically or watch their kids for part of the day. Make it so they don’t need to return home while they may be busy with hospital visits or prepping logistics to accommodate a new situation, and try to bake in a way for them to have their spouse with them so they have their own support on-hand, too. - Make it about you.
Even in their lowest moments, it’s hard for people to accept help when they know they can’t reciprocate. I address this head-on by reminding them what’s in it for me: the privilege of being helpful in a moment someone needs it.
Here’s how I phrased it to a friend recently after I tossed out a couple of ideas: “please let me help if these things would be at all useful – or if anything else comes to mind. Imagine if the situation was reversed and how desperately you’d want to do something to feel like you lightened the smallest bit of load for your friend in a difficult moment.”
Here’s how I phrased it to a relative stranger who will never be in a position to “repay” our exchange: “it’s not often we get to feel like we can personally ‘pay forward’ the many kindnesses we all rack up in life, so I appreciate you letting me feel like I can play a small part of your fresh beginning.”
Be good to each other.
when your two twelve seeds
pull off the wins, you almost
HAVE to stop and flex.
Prior to the pandemic, I made an event of a grocery run for me and a child (or two, or three). Our local grocery had a selection of free cookies and strong coffee, and the boys would indulge in the former while I indulged in the latter. They liked selecting the cereals, or granola bar flavors, or cake mixes. They animatedly “drove” the race car shopping cart and, in one particularly disgusting moment, discovered some kind of partially consumed beefstick in the cab of the vehicle and… you know, finished the job. (Before you wonder what I was doing that I didn’t intercept that activity, I refer you to an entire post devoted to Steve the Wine Guy & other members of our grocery’s cast of characters).
When COVID hit, not only were we no longer comfortable having the boys join me in the store, but we wanted to minimize total time spent of exposure overall. I therefore planned for 2 weeks of meals at a time — breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks without any additional care to help prepare in our snippets of time between parenting and work — for our family of 5. What did this practically mean?
1. I suppressed minor panic attacks when I would arrive to empty shelves of items featured on my list: bread, meat, Spaghettios. I contemplated showing “proof of children” when they rationed things like gallons of milk or packages of chicken.
2. My cart was so full — so comically full — that after the first few runs, I deployed a new strategy of checking out and loading up the car after the produce + meat + bread sections, then coming right back in and doing another round through the aisles + dairy + frozen section.
3. How does one store all these precisely planned & purchased groceries once they’re finally offloaded in the back hallway? Enter: “the Panic Pantry.” Highly perishable, fresh food was stored per meal plans in the kitchen refrigerator and pantry. The basement’s Panic Pantry was where I stashed less perishable foods, staples we’d dip into in a pinch, even bunches of bananas bought while they were still green so that — by the time we consumed all of the fresh fruit we had bought upfront — we still had fresh fruit even starting day 7+. By the time we were on days 11 – 14, we were having meals made of thawed meat, frozen vegetables, and boxed carbs like rice or pasta.
At some point, over a year after everything began, I had to bring a boy with me to the grocery again. We went back to fitting our groceries all in 1 cart as we planned for only 1 week at a time. And we finished our last snacks from the Panic Pantry.
In two years, we never went hungry. We never had any noticeable nutritional deficiencies. I have a lot to be grateful for with respect to how we weathered the pandemic as a family. But I’ll be honest, it breaks my heart a little bit that only J remembers what a big deal those free cookies once were.
