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.
For posterity’s sake, a gift guide for the winners from Christmas 2021:
For your…
- — Husband who is impossible to buy for: pajama pants that are so good that you buy a pair in size S for yourself after the holidays.
- — Small children who need autonomy in entertainment but certainly less screen-time: a Yoto player and cards! Our boys love them for bedtime stories, long car rides, or simply having on while they’re building Legos. (Aside: because this is a UK-based product, J now delivers the punchlines he learned from this joke card in an English accent.)
- — Baby who lives a life in hand-me-downs: a NogginStik, brand new for him because his brothers loved theirs so much that they wore them all out.
- — Boys’ “bro” room (read: 2 x bunk bed sets for maximum efficiency as they grow): a fitting pillow.
- — Dad who is impossible to buy for: the best sweatpants to dress up or down. (See the trend here?)
- — Mom who sets a beautiful table and is truly the mostess hostess: a beautiful charcuterie plank.
- — Sister who adores her Sunday morning pancakes breakfast with her son: gourmet pancake mix and a batter bowl.
- — Nephew who adores anything he does with his mom: a play pancake set.
- — Brother who is short of stature but long in opinions about fit of clothing: Peter Manning NYC cotton pullover.
- — New nieces who live afar but ought to know all of their cousins favorite books: Alphablock, Baby Faces, Little Excavator.
- — Favorite neighbors and friends: Prindables apples & sweets gift sets.
- — Stockings in need of stuffing: Mr. Bubbles, bakugan balls, & kid bath bombs.
- — And finally, if you can believe it, a Santa supplied statement that I’d surely never be bold enough to make on my own:
I am deeply, sincerely thankful to be in this season of life. 4 little boys. The pile of damp mittens and snow pants by the door. The chatter of their sweet conversations held over cinnamon toast at the counter in the morning. The visible laughter in their sparking blue eyes. The smell of their skin after an afternoon playing in the sun. The warmth of their breath, snuggled deep in a tangle of blankets as they sleep. The sound of their feet racing through the hall in the wee hours of the morning (side note: whoever described it as “pitter-patter” must have had girls).
I know better than to actively hurry these moments away with thoughts of what comes next and how, surely once the youngest is X years old, I will be less tired and maybe even have time to get one of those hobbies people sometimes reference. But I’ll be honest here: I do fantasize about certain experiences, ranging from mundane to extravagant — but they don’t make sense until the kids are old enough to engage with it.
On Thanksgiving day, we found ourselves up north for a long weekend of R&R. The weather was foggy and wet, so the boys entertained themselves indoors with a cache of Legos — or, in A’s case, evidently by switching the dryer to “Air Fluff” mode, which would confound his parents for hours the next day as the laundry kept coming out damp. We ate frozen pizza for dinner, minimizing time spent cleaning up after the meal so we could find ourselves snuggled on the couch by 6. We turned on Home Alone. By the time the crooks were staggering through Kevin McCallister’s booby-trapped home, O and J were actively shouting “YES!” “He is the greatest!” “They’re going to slip on that — watch, Mom, watch!”
Years ago, I fantasized about these low-key movie nights, particularly those that feature flicks that I remember fondly. Until just recently, we couldn’t count on both O & J to stay seated and pay close enough attention to follow the plot arc of a full-length film. I am so thankful to find myself here where we can enjoy these moments together.
The passage of time is a double-edged sword with kids. There may come a day when all 4 boys are old enough to participate in a family movie night, and perhaps at that time I will think longingly about how sweet it was to be interrupted from a movie by a baby needing comfort that only his mother could provide, or a toddler with a 7pm bedtime who needed to be sung to sleep.
But so far — and without exception — I have found that every stage of life has something to look forward to. Not to rush away the days that color your life’s story, but to appreciate the moment you are in while simultaneously recognizing the excited anticipation about what lies ahead.
So this year, while my sons are thankful for dragons, Spider-Man, and fire trucks (respectively), I am thankful for arriving at a simple yet lovely fantasy… thankful to be exactly where I am today, and thankful that as fleeting as these moments may be, there are always more ahead.
My grandma’s dishes, serving our ad hoc Thanksgiving Tuesday with my parents – because I’m not quite “woke” enough to only have frozen pizza for our Thanksgiving meal.
spent hours carving, but
according to our neighbor,
dave’s pumpkin’s* the best.
*see tiny face.
The more time we spend as parents, the more often I catch myself watching Dave with the boys, thinking about how deeply endearing it is that the same young man I found so intimidatingly witty, so intellectually captivating, so absurdly handsome 14 years ago — the man that I married — is now the father to my sons. And, dare I say, how often that mental train of thought is followed by a wave of validation: damn right he’s knocking fatherhood out of the park in a fashion equally as impressive as anyone who knows him is accustomed to.
There are many ways in which Dave sets a wonderful example for our sons… around work ethic, self-care, environmentalism, compassion for others, generosity (just to name a few)… but these particular aspects of his style of “dadding” are my personal favorites:
- Credit-less care: I am not exaggerating when I say that Dave has more raw intelligence than perhaps anyone I’ve ever met. He has a post-graduate degree. He works as an officer in a financial company and has to be available at essentially any time of the day, any day of the week. So it’s all the sweeter to me that he also painstakingly reassembles and glues the broken tail of J’s styrofoam plane after its crash landing, or creates a tension-based repair solution for O’s “special ring” (dentist prize) after it was left out and stepped on, or reattaches the lift-the-flap pages from “Where’s Spot” after too many enthusiastic reads by A. He does these types of things shortly after bedtime so the glue can dry by the time the boys wake up, and they are reliably elated. Unless I catch the exchange and make a point to acknowledge what he’s done for them, the boys rarely question how their possessions seem to miraculously rebound from the brink of certain doom (the garbage). He does this — this unasked, unexpected, credit-less care — in a thousand different ways throughout the year. I can only imagine all the things that even I don’t notice.
- Physicality of play: this dynamic I don’t think is unique to our family, but I appreciate it nevertheless. I love that Dave’s style of play with our boys is so different from – and incremental to – my own. We went sledding last winter at some nearby sand dunes. I climbed maybe 25% of the way up the hill, thought that was plenty high, and started stabilizing my sled to have a boy join me to sled down, only to realize that Dave had continued the march upward until they reached the very top. The experience of Dad pushing the tire swing vs Mom is not even close anymore (and probably explains why they don’t ask me if Dad’s nearby…). J had only just mastered the monkey bars last fall when Dave demonstrated how one can also climb on top of them. Years ago, Dave read an article about how dads tend to stop being affectionate with sons around the age of 2, despite the fact that sons still need the physical affirmations as much as daughters for many years afterwards. So the physicality of play and affection also extends to everyday interactions, and creates this incredibly warm sense of heart in the core of our home.
- Quality of leisure time: give Dave a 2-hour block of 1:1 time with his son, and he will turn it into a memory they’ll talk about for months. He will turn uncommitted time into a child-paced walk around a downtown, a bike ride to somewhere novel, lunch out someplace special. Contrary to how someone else (not pointing any fingers here, just hypothetically speaking, I assure you…) might approach those 2 hours, however, where she is compulsively compelled to also fit in something like a pit-stop at the library to return books, or lunch as restricted to being near a store that she has to run an errand at anyway, or just trying to hype-up an otherwise pretty standard grocery excursion… Dave is strictly motivated by the joint leisure time. The drive is spent listening to music selected to the son’s taste (which they then request during car rides for weeks afterward). Waiting for the meal is spent playing games on the back of the restaurant place mat. There’s somehow always an opportunity for ice cream or Slurpees or poppities afterward. J came home with his “journal” from junior kindergarten, and a number of the pages with prompts like “what did you do over the weekend” featured answers around simply being with his dad — in the hammock, playing, lying in the grass and looking at “clowds.” In our increasingly busy microcosm, the little moments of focused attention shine – and matter. And Dave makes the most of them.
And, of course, I’d be remiss to exclude what is evidently key, touted by many: “the most important thing a father can do for his children is love their mother.” If that’s the gold standard, then I am particularly happy to report that 14 years after this witty, captivating, handsome man first told me he loves me, our children have their most important bases covered.
Happy Father’s Day, Dave.
