easter (without the bunny)

Jon and I hesitate in doing outrageous things for our kids for holidays and birthdays, mostly since they're not old enough to care that much or to remember any fabulous plans we come up with. We get somewhat stuck trying to find a balance between over-the-top gift giving and nothing at all (which seems lest wasteful to us), hoping to come up with something tasteful, simple, and meaningful, but feeling like that takes a lot of creativity and effort that we haven't struck into just yet. (If you have any tips, we'd love to hear them!) So some things may or may not go somewhat uncelebrated in the Smith home—at least compared to what we imagine many other families doing.

Easter this year was one of those. We did try to teach Van about to real meaning of Easter, and ended up kind of getting ourselves into a mess trying to explain death and realizing that to our 3-year-old, life and death all sounds like a very casual thing with no emotional implications whatsoever. So if our son happens to say anything insensitive to you regarding death or dying, we apologize in advance. We're working on that concept. :)

But when it comes to the Easter bunny and baskets and treasures, our children are virtually clueless. Our non-religious Easter celebration consisted of attending the ward Easter egg hunt on Saturday morning...and that's it. They loved it, and I saw this as no problem for now since our kids are still so little, until Sunday at church when I was dropping off Van in Primary. As Van got to his chair, one of the older kids sitting behind him (a kid Van idolizes, of course), asked Van what he got from the Easter bunny. You can imagine my embarrassment when poor Van didn't say a word and looked at me in confusion, with eyes begging me to explain what his friend was talking about. I tried to cover for Van by saying yes, he got Easter eggs with candy in his basket, but the older child called my bluff and said, "You mean just from the church party yesterday?" I must not have been very convincing, because in my attempts to make it sound like everyone else's Easter morning, the child questioned again, "Well did he get anything from the Easter bunny? Did he? Did he?!?!" Poor Van never said a word, and I learned that it seems we'll have to act on our plans to find a healthy compromise between normal holiday traditions and what we feel is appropriate sooner than I had thought.

Thankfully, for now it seems Van has been totally unaffected by the exchange and he hasn't even mentioned it since. Or maybe that means he was traumatized. Either way, we'll most likely be jumping on a more conventional Easter celebration next year. But for now, the ward Easter egg hunt seemed to be fulfilling enough for our two kiddos. :) They look happy to me! Not to mention cute as ever...