Sad Easter

When Lauren was with Lindsay at Lock Haven after the surgery, she realized she had to tend to some Easter matters or she would miss the date. Specifically, she needed to order Mrs. Cavanaugh’s mindy mint Easter eggs for all the kids. Inasmuch as she was in Lindsay’s dorm room and Lindsay was present, Lauren tried to manage this quickly and in moments when Lindsay wasn’t looking. Everything seemed to go smoothly. All the kids out of the house received theirs in the middle of the week leading to Easter and reported their joy.

Then, on Saturday, Lauren looked at the eggs that had been shipped to our house. One read Lauren, another read Gordon, and the last read Grant. And that would be all fine and great if the last child living at our house were named Grant, but it’s not—it’s Graham. What’s better is Graham is the only kid in the family who doesn’t like mindy mints and doesn’t care much for chocolate at all. Why we got him one is beyond me (“Everyone gets one, so he gets one,” per Lauren, which is another way of saying, “When we finish ours, we’ll eat his if he hasn’t”).

The only solution was for Lauren to open the box and scrape off the name, like so.

She could have tried to blame the company, but Lauren was an adult and admitted she had ordered wrong while under duress in Lindsay’s room. Thus far, while we have not kept this fact a secret, Graham is none the wiser, and since he never reads these posts, he won’t learn it here either. Even better, he hasn’t touched the egg yet, so it looks good for us to eat his when done with ours.

As Lauren was engaged doctoring the mindy mint, I was cracking open the package of pre-stuffed eggs. Yeah, we bought pre-stuffed eggs. We’ve never done this before, but we’re down to the final kid and we had open debate about whether there would even be an Easter egg hunt, but Lauren, pretending we believe in fairness, said we couldn’t abandon all tradition for the last child. We compromised by buying eggs that already had candy in them so as to minimize the effort.

I broke those open, and look at this picture.

Yeah, one of the pre-packed eggs was, in fact, half an egg with nothing in it. Yikes.

Even better, over the last month, we invited at least four families to join us for Easter dinner, and all had plans, so it appeared that we would be by ourselves with Lauren’s mother. We affectionately began to call it “Sad Easter.”

On Easter morning, we woke up, and Graham found his Easter basket. Lauren took his picture at the top of the stairs and sent it to the Goons, which elicited the following.

Lindsay: That is so depressing. One kid at home.

Grant: How have we gotten to this?

Lindsay: LOOOOSSSEEERRR!

Sad Easter, indeed. We headed downstairs for Graham to do the world’s least intense Easter egg hunt, as shown.

At Church, we did find three people who wanted to have Easter dinner with us. Fortunately, we had plenty of pulled pork. I mentioned yesterday how I made videos to show Grant how to smoke meat properly. I sent him a picture of finished product and said, “This is how it’s done.”

His reply?

Grant: That looks AWESOME. I just got sonned by my dad.

Yes, sir, you did.

In the end, Sad Easter turned out well—beautiful weather, a few close friends, Lauren’s mother, and still being able to teach your oldest a thing or two.

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