Easter weekend

My boys spent all of last week off for Spring Break, and I finally got to join in the fun on Thursday. 

Yea! Spring Break! Fun outside! Whoo hoo!

Ummmm, no.  I'd been looking forward to spending some time outside, hopefully on my mountain bike, but the amount of rain we've had lately ended those hopes.  Instead, I spent most of Thursday sorting through a huge basket filled with old insurance EOBs, kids' school papers, bank statements, and assorted stuff that you must save looking for the receipt for my brakes.  No luck, though I did get 3 years' worth of paper filed away.  I also took J swimming, which ended early after a kid vomited in the pool.  Mmmmm.  Spring break was off to a rolicking start.

Friday morning, we were greeted with this:

Hail.  Awesome.  Did I mention our garage door is broken?

The sky did clear up long enough for me to take J for a walk around the block, go to the playground, and have "how to stop your bike without jumping off" class.  He hasn't yet graduated, so we'll be practicing more before hitting the bike trails together.  He needs to get better, or I need to get faster, because I have a hard time running fast enough to keep up with him and make sure he doesn't end up blowing through a stop sign.

Unfortunately, that friendly weather was only temporary.  Friday night found us in the basement with tornado sirens going off.  Thankfully, the area where I live was spared, but cities and towns around us sustained some major damage.  Lambert Airport in St. Louis was closed for a day while they cleaned up all of the damage there.  Check out the picture I took of the Fox2 news broadcast.  That shuttle bus is not supposed to be there.  They also showed a picture of softball-sized hail.  Thank goodness that missed us!

Note some of my birthday balloons still rolling around

Saturday and Sunday we enjoyed Easter celebrations with first my family and then Jeff's.  Before church on Sunday, I managed to get in 6 of my 8 scheduled miles...and that's my last "long" run before the marathon this coming Sunday.  Now in addition to watching the local weather, I've begun obsessing over the weather forecast for LaCrosse, Wisconsin.  Right now it looks like high of 51 and rainy.  If you have advice on how to dress for that, please share it with me.

Now, my family is suitably slacker-ish about holiday celebrations.  We're there for the food, the company, and maybe the trivia.  Jeff's family, on the other hand, goes all out.  (Exhibits 1 and 2: our Halloween party and family costumes). This is fun, if you are the target of such holiday festivities; for example, my birthday balloons, or if you aren't the person sewing costumes or hiding eggs.  Ah, hiding eggs....I really couldn't say express my feelings about Easter egg hunts better than Cheeseboy's recent post  Easter Egg Hunts: Pure Evil.

Back yard picture to break up the text

Being solidly in the egg-hunt-scrooge minority, however, I was conscripted into hiding eggs in my mother-in-law's soggy (because, remember, we've had about two straight weeks of rain) back yard.  No one went for my plan, which involved dumping a pile of eggs on the living room floor and letting the kids count out their allotted number...innovation is apparently frowned upon.  And not only did I have a Bad Attitude about the whole thing, but I was also not dressed for the task.  High heels and wet ground don't mix well.


Now you see 'em.....................now you don't.

Because my heels kept sinking into the ground, I spend egg hiding purgatory walking around like a drunken sailor, inwardly threatening If I sprain my ankle doing this and can't run the marathon.... If you're thinking to yourself that I could've just taken off the shoes, a) you're right and b) please don't interrupt my complaining with your common sense solutions again.

Lots of eggs go into the plants...not sure how many come out...

The first thing to understand about my MIL's egg hunt is that we used to have about 12 kids hunting eggs.  Some of the kids have aged out, but somehow we have even more eggs to hide.  Each of the 5 kids hunting yesterday could collect up to 50 eggs.  Do the math: we had to hide 250 eggs in a yard that isn't all that big.  My strategy was to hide them all in painfully obvious places.

Perhaps not this obvious

The second thing to understand about the egg hunt is that each egg must be accounted for.  This means that we repeatedly count our child's eggs to make sure that they don't have too many and add all the totals up.  If they don't total 250, we have to keep looking.  And this is how the Easter egg hunt can stretch on longer than the duration of Lent.  The kids have all given up and are happily counting their money while the adults are still outside searching for the last few eggs. 

I love this picture.  She has a beautiful flower garden.

Well, not this girl.  Not this year.  After making sure that I got all the kids to pose for  great shots of each kid Easter egg hunting, I watched for a while and then quietly made my way back to the enclosed back porch where a nap was waiting for me.  A nap which lasted all of the way through Warner Brothers Trivial Pursuit, at which I stink.  A nap which lasted almost until it was time to go home.  And on the way home, I posted my book review for Little Bee on my book blog (next up: The Lacuna). All in all, a pretty nice weekend.