You’ll have that song in your head for the rest of the day now. As we all know, it’s Easter, the queer time of the year when we try to convince our children that an especially large, yet very stealthy rabbit, will break into our home in the middle of the night and hide chicken eggs that we only finished coloring last night.
With any luck the bunny will also leave chocolate renditions of himself along with other barnyard animals behind too, letting you know that even in a vegetarian family, at least once a year it’s O.K to feast on innocent animals.
I have always been confused by Easter. No, I’m not talking about the religious version. I get that. How could I not. For years, my twice a year church going family would don their Sunday best and trudge off to St. Anthony’s Church in downtown Renton.
At some point church mercifully ended and we could return home. While we would get out of our church clothes the Easter bunny would magically arrive at our house, hiding eggs where only moments before, there were none. Rarely did he ever hide them outside, for as we all know, it rains for much of the year in Seattle and I can count sunny Easters on one hand and still have enough fingers left to pinch someone for not wearing green on St. Patty’s Day.
At the appointed moment in my house, the hounds would be released, i.e., the four boys would be let loose to find all the eggs we could. I have to assume that the Easter bunny was still in our house at the time, because baskets filled with chocolate appeared on the hearth in the living room, which we had swept clean only moments before of eggs. Hhm.
We were ravenous in our pursuit of those damned hard boiled eggs which never seemed to turn the rich colors shown on the Paas Easter Egg Coloring Kit box. Part of the reason was none of us boys had the patience to wait for an egg to properly color. At other times, I think it was because my mother had forgotten to buy white vinegar to add to the cups.
But back to the hunt. When I had my own children, I still preferred to do the house hunt. I have the cutest video of Parker hunting eggs in our Port Orchard house, our egg sucking hound Jasper always a few steps ahead, showing Parker where the eggs were. Jasper was really good at finding the real eggs, but not the ones with chocolate inside. Parker couldn’t really tell the difference between the two at that age, and he would zealously crack the real eggs open to see if there was candy inside. We always had ended up having to have egg salad sandwiches for Easter lunch.
I shied away from the public hunts. I only went to one in Bellevue once. My girlfriend at the time and I took our two girls to the community Easter egg hunt. We thought it would be a nice, relaxing little morning.
Boy were we wrong. Kids were crowding the rope like it was the 50 yard dash at the Olympics. Their parents took off right with them, making sure that their kids were not going to get cheated out of a single egg. In fact, they didn’t even bother waiting for the kids to find the egg. They would do all the recon, shoving other little kids out of the way when one of the “special” eggs were found. These could be redeemed for prizes, so tiny tots became expendable left and right when any of these eggs were on a parent’s, uh, child’s horizon.
It was chaos to say the least. I swore I would never go back.
I have learned this year that I was just ahead of my time in my angst over these pushy parents and their take no prisoners style of parenting.
It seems that parents all have ruined these once quaint community events. So-called “helicopter parents” — they get the name because they hover over their children and are involved in every aspect of their lives to ensure they don’t fail — have ruined Easter egg hunts.
Communities all over the country are canceling these community celebrations, which is a bit odd anyway since Easter is technically a religious holiday and separation of church and state should have meant there never was a hunt in a public park, but I digress once again.
By the time our day in Bellevue had ended, our respective daughters were in tears. Pushy parents ruined their Easter, as are parents across our great land.
Hey, helicopter parents, stop hovering. Your kids aren’t going to be any more successful with you in control of their lives. If anything, they may just come to resent you and grow up to be complete failures just to spite you. In the meantime, you’ve taken all the fun out of finding Easter eggs.
Before you know it, you’ll be ruining Little League too, bitching about the fact that your kid didn’t get traded and had to warm the bench last week as punishment for you berating a fellow teammate from the stands.
Oh, wait! You already are doing that.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. The few of us normal parents know that you’re just trying to realize your own failed dreams through your kids. And we laugh because you’re teaching your children to win at all costs only because you were, and are, such a loser.
Out on the Treasure Coast (for five more days), wondering if I should look for Easter eggs in the airplane this week,
– Robb