Yes, I know, I know. I’m behind. I’ll get caught up in the next day or two because I’m almost at half a year of blog posts. Yippee!

Ready for my excuses for missing a couple of posts? Sure you are. We had a slew of people over for Easter. What a joy! I stayed up until 3 am Saturday night tying little plaid ribbons around napkins and putting together Easter baskets for my ungrateful, way too old children. What is the cutoff for this kind of stuff? Will I be making them baskets when I’m in the nursing home?

I made little clues for a scavenger hunt for my daughter (my son has lost interest). I usually make each clue a little narratives like, “look in a place where your dad snores.” That’s a good one, because she’d have to look in the bed, on the couch, on the other couch, in the La Z Boy, at the kitchen table, and in the bathtub.

At 3:00 I wasn’t in the mood for writing little novels, so here were my clues: “Brrrr.” “Kick it,” “Shelley’s perch,” “Dad’s perch.” I made 14 of them and taped them all over the place. She’d go to the one that said, “Shelley’s perch” and then she’d find another one hidden there that said, “Brrrr” and she’d go look in all the refrigerators and freezers and found the next one that said, “Kick it.”

“Is it on the dog?” she asked.

“Kick the poor little sweet dog?????” I asked. “And it’s Easter morning!”

This one she could not get. She looked all over the house for balls or kickable objects. Then she looked all around my son’s drum set. “I can’t find it,” she whimpered.

“What’s the clue?” her dad asked.

“Kick it.”

“Did you look on the dog?”

“Enough!!!” I said. “It’s a device that kicks things.”

She roamed through the house again. “Is it a hula hoop?” “Is it a book?” “Is it the sewing machine?”

“It’s a DEVICE in the BONUS ROOM that kicks things.”

“We’re going to be late for church.”

“It’s a GAME in the bonus room that kicks things.”

She went out there and looked around, completely stumped.

“A GAME!  A DEVICE!”

“Oh, the foosball table,” she finally said when I clumped my coffee mug down on it.

There were a few other clues that had her scratching her head, but finally she found the basket, I took some pictures, and we both rushed to get ready. She was right, we were late for church and had to stand up through the whole service – me in my heels and her without a coat right by the door where assorted people kept taking fussy children out of or sneaking late into.

It was a great day though, thanks to the company and the feast my husband cooked. I wish you could have seen it! He made enough for a hundred people, and I did my very best to mow through my fair share, but we’ve still got a refrigerator full of leftovers even after giving a ton of it away.

At exactly midnight on Saturday, I grabbed every bag of Easter candy I could find and gorged myself on chocolate. If you’ve never given up sweets for 40 days, you don’t know what sheer joy there is in tasting your first chocolate at 12:01 am on Easter Sunday. What a veritable feast it was. I am so thankful to the Hershey’s company for making all that good stuff.

I was also thankful that the good Lord let me get through Easter Sunday without feeling tired. He even made me hyper! But that could have been the chocolate, no?