We May Not Celebrate Easter Next Year After This Crazy Easter Weekend.

So if I ever skip a day posting, like the Saturday before Easter…

…Please say a little prayer for me.

I will have a new post I’m writing in my head that will have a title something like,

“I’m taking the Easter Bunny back behind the woodshed.”

or

“I’m going to kick that Bunnies A$$!”.

Story content will have everything to do with three little boys deciding to color Easter eggs without me.  I told them we would color eggs when I came back from the grocery store.  They called me on my cell while I was shopping to say they decorated the eggs without me.  They were so proud.

I exhaled while yelling in the phone, “BUT I HAVEN’T BOILED THE EGGS YET!”

Peter happily said, “I know Mom!  That’s why we poked a hole in the top and bottom of each egg and BLEW THEM OUT!”

I came home with a suburban full of groceries and no way to bring them into the kitchen.  There was yolk on the back splash and floor was a hazmat site. Slimy egg whites all over the floor and dried egg white splatter all over the dark wood cabinets, the countertops, and the appliances. I am not even stressed out yet about the dye that is spilled all over the kitchen table and chairs and banquette.  I hadn’t even processed the fact my kids have put their mouths all over unwashed raw eggs.  The CDC is going to have a tough time determining if our salmonella outbreak is from our Easter eggs or from catching turtles in the pond.

Why YES, Peter did indeed bring a turtle from our pond to the club’s Saturday Easter brunch, because that is the only way we could get him out of the pond.

We woke up to find our baskets this morning and Peter received a giant container of SUPER bubble juice the Easter Bunny gave him.

The Easter bunny was thinking it may kill some of the turtle germs on his hands.  Then, because AGAIN God has a sense of humor, Peter then immediately spilled the SUPER bubble juice all over on our shag carpet.  Our thick throw rug shag carpet on a wood floor with a foam grippy pad under it, like the kind of shag rug that needs a rake and makes me immediately mid-century modern cool because we have it in our house.

Little known facts about shag carpet and bubble juice.

– Bubble juice, SUPER bubble juice is sticky like glue.

– Shag carpet can hold about $197.69 in change before you notice that their is money in your carpet and this means it is NEVER letting the sticky SUPER bubble juice out.

– In order to get the bubble juice out you have to run pitchers of water through it.  repeatedly.

– In order to get the water out of the carpet you need a shop vac.

– When shop vac’s suction water and SUPER bubble juice it turns the shop vac into a giant bubble maker.

Let me paint a picture…bubbles and water spitting out of the top and sides of shop vac.  I am throwing towels over shop vac to knock down spray.  Shop Vac has pretty giant bubbles stuck to all of its cracks.

I’m still in my pjs due to bubble juice extraction is a messy, messy job.

Another bit of proof that God had a sense of humor is that the egg mess and the bubble mess did not happen in the same room.

Pray for me. Heck, you better pray for my kids!

I think I may have just written that post.  Writing is like therapy.  I tried my first post from my phone and finally opened laptop.  I kept updating as I wrote so sorry if you read a first draft.

Colored Chicks Banned From Country Club This Easter

Colored chicks are banned from our country club this Easter

The prejudice began when the parents started making small talk with “Farm Lady.”  They began asking, “How did you dye them?, Do you dip them?  Does it hurt the little babies?  Will they stay that color?  Will the other animals shun them because they don’t look like them?”

Club management asked the “farm lady” to stop bringing them.  We go to the clubs Easter brunch and egg hunt because we have three little boys who want to see the cool neon alternative chicks.  They are amazing.  “Farm Lady” brings bunnies, snakes, iguanas, and other critters, and she used to bring a few colored chicks and ducks.

She is always so patient as she explains to the parents that they don’t “dip” them.  That they inject the egg with food coloring, (just like we have in our human food and the same way scientist track wild bird movements).  That only the chicks down is colored and it will fall out soon and then they will be back to their regular color.  She explains that they are raised to be shared for a couple of weeks, as part of her traveling petting zoo, and then they will go off to live at a local farm just like a regular chicken or duck.

For crying out loud, I want to shout, “You just fed your kids processed chicken nuggets! Those “nugget chickens” were raised in horrible conditions and probably never even got to walk in actual grass.  Chances are they ground off their beaks so they couldn’t peck each other to death.  They were likely injected with hormones to produce larger breasts.  Shut your traps.

The “Farm Lady” rocks.  I was raised on a farm.  I have asked her questions.  I have stood next to her while three boys have to pet, hold and usually figure out a way to “wear” each of her critters.  She is patient and kind and makes sure the kids are gentle and she herself  is gentle.  She gives these country club kids a chance to touch and hold animals that most people 100 years ago had in their backyards.  Animals they had to care for and then eventually eat.

She gives kids an opportunity to touch other beings. It may lead to some of these children gaining more respect for creatures that we share the world with.  It’s just a green chicken.

My boys looked forward to these neon, fluffy, make-you-happier-than-a-Cadbury-Egg- chicks.  Do you know how happy it makes me when my kids are more excited about something they don’t get to eat and that causes one of their combined 16 cavities, (per our last family dentist appointment).  Do not judge.  Yes, they brush.

If you enjoyed this you may enjoy, “Country Club, Bible Belt, gated Community…Let’s Give Her the WTF License Plate.”

https://allthatmakesyou.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/country-club-bible-belt-gated-community-lets-give-her-the-wtf-license-plate/

Or this one…

https://allthatmakesyou.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/exploding-eggs-and-nakedness/

or “The $hit my kid says is better than your dad’s $hit.”

Follow me and press the button..

Before you start chewing me out…They are not being sold.

http://www.ehow.com/how_6759132_color-baby-chickens.html

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• Dyeing Easter Chicks Raises Concern Over Animal Welfare (ecorazzi.com)

Country club, bible belt, gated community…lets give her the “WTF” license plate.

My husband and I have been together since we were kids in rural Michigan.  Our families still share vegetables, (mostly because they want to rub it in each others faces who’s came in first and who has the biggest) and my husband never had a washer and dryer growing up.  Sundays were laundromat days with just him and his dad.  It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford to buy a washer and dryer it was because he was growing up in the family farmhouse.  No electricity on the second floor kind of house.  The kind of place where the windows would freeze up on the inside during Michigan winters and the outside was peeling plywood.  Eventually they would push the place over with a tractor and drop a modular home where it once stood but that was after my husband was raised and gone and long after his mom moved out with his sisters.   He rode dirt bikes and when he could finally drive legally he drove HIS car that had only one knob that you moved around to control everything on the dash and it smelled like spoiled milk and you didn’t care because it was $50 bucks and you paid in cash.  His dad was stabbed in a bar fight (he lived) and his mom worked in one.  His cousin had a baby in the bathroom at the VFW.  No one knew she was pregnant but now everyone knows she is the girl who had the baby in the toilet.  That is how he grew up and what made him who he is or like he says, “That’s why we are raising our kids ten hours away.”

I had twins with many health problems the first year so I proclaimed I was NOT going back to work to support us.  We would have to make due on the little bit of student loans we could get.  That meant sharing a car.  My grandparents thought this was completely stupid.  Who would have thought that someone from their generation would think a one car household was stupid?

This giant gold van pulls into my driveway one day.  My grandparents get out of it and they tell me its mine.  This is not a minivan.  This is a full size conversion van with running boards and mini blinds.  I smile because I have been raised right as they show me why we need this house on wheels.  It was customized.  It was customized?  They didn’t know that my giant double stroller folded up.  Picture the front seat being two giant RV chairs and an oak dashboard/control center.  I have an entire panel of mood lighting controls.  The middle row is a bench that you climb up a couple of steps to get in with only one door on one side and this is where it gets freaky…there is a piece of glass directly behind the second row bench.  It has the wall of glass like a limo.  Behind the glass is a truck bed.  Its half RV and half truck.  It is half truck so you simply toss the giant twin stroller in because they didn’t know it folded up.  Do I not have the sweetest grandparents ever?

Now look at it though the eyes of a 27-year-old woman who just had two babies, I have two babies nursing on me constantly and I feel anchored to the center of the earth, I just quit my fab job that allowed me to travel and I now had a “ghetto gold-Chester the molester-no one will park next to me at the mall for fear of being abducted” full size conversion van to drive around my hometown that I just moved back to after five years of living away.  I just kept smiling because I was pretty sure the giant “Half-Back” that was printed across the front window, so if you were standing in the front of the van and you couldn’t see that the back half was a truck, you would know, was actually stickers that I might be able to scrape off.

Flash forward several years and we got the heck out of our home town.  What were we thinking moving back?  We landed in the south, in a “country club community”.  In a “gated” country club community.  JR worked hard and is a physician now.  His parents both take credit that it’s from their side.  He does have some mad pool playing skills they endowed him with.   I sang George Jefferson’s “Moving on up” for months as I padded around our new home.

When we moved into our “forever house” my husband was still in training and so we were still driving our beat up old cars and I was still driving Chester.  I have never met a more comfortable seat and never had to leave anything behind because it didn’t fit in the car on a road trip.  The blinds were now a little crooked and the fabric seats keep our shampooer plugged in and I may have torn a running board half off while making a turn but it was free.  My husband kept asking me to pick out a new car.  I couldn’t stop telling people about my neighbor lady that apologized for not waving to me because she didn’t recognize me in my “van”.  She went on to explain she though I was a housekeeper.  Nice.

I kept saying “NO” to my husband about replacing Chester. I told him with three boys and their stuff I needed a car that big.  He finally pulled into a Chevy dealership and said pick out the color of a Suburban .  I said, “White and can I get leather seats?”  The next thing my husband does is insist we get those stickers of that represent our family and plaster us all across the back.  These are like a dog marking its territory.  I have always had a theory that those stick families are not on the people’s cars that knew they would eventually find themselves a family.  They are for the people who weren’t sure that someone would marry them and then agree to have their kids and then they would all stay together long enough that you need stick people in various sizes.  I buy them and hope he forgets but he doesn’t.  I put them on but I did not put them in order of height.  It was my protest.  The entire time I was putting them on I kept thinking of the “half-back” I removed from the front of the van my grandparents bought us.  My grandparents are now gone and it aches.  Those little stickers mean something to my husband and I understand.

I often tease that the club and neighborhood didn’t do a good background check before they “let us in” because we felt a bit out-of-place in this environment.  That is when I am, again, reminded that God has a sense of humor because my new shiny license plate for my shiny new Suburban comes in the mail and my plate randomly says, “WTF”.  There were news reports that these were indeed printed mistakenly and that we could return them to the license plate office.  I didn’t.  I like the irony.  I like where we came from and believe it or not I like where we are.  Sure, my kids never have to wonder if I’m frying pork chops to mask the smell of Marijuana and they don’t know how to shoot a squirrel out of a house window but they are sweet.  I drive my clean white Suburban with the ironic license plate  proudly and with a smirk.

Added a few days later…

 I thought my husband was going to kill me when he read it (and because he screamed for me to come in the house when he came home from work) but then when I came in (from fake gardening-hiding from him) he was a little teared up.  Then he gave me a future post idea…he told me my story was so touching but my grammar and punctuation was, “like a man who is an adult film star but really ugly.”  Bahahaha!  I only emailed him the story because someone we know, (the only person I know who has read my blog) tweeted a link to the story and FB’d it and I was like crap…its about JR….I better tell him first (that I told the story of the cousin having a baby in a toilet and the other family stuff).