St Paddy's Egg Hunt with a wee bit o' Astronomy

Thought you might be interested to know....

Over a month ago someone gave us a helium balloon. It's still floating.

I have no idea how.

And with that random fact out of the way....

This week is Greg's spring break. I am suspending the usual Bible story & alphabet lessons Dale is doing to do spring stuff instead.

I am in such a time warp. Being gone from home in a completely foreign situation for 7 weeks does weird things to you. Today I saw something dated 12-10-07 and didn't think it was that long ago.

Riiiight.

Anyway, so in some ways it is hard to believe that it is Spring and Easter already. Of course, both Easter and the time change came very early this year. Which reminds me - have you gotten that email forward about this being the earliest Easter has been in something like 95 years and will be for a long time?

It was the kind of thing that was supposed to make you say "wow, neat" or something to that effect, but instead it made this funny feeling come over me, like it was Twilight Zonish or something. But pay no attention to me... I was terrified when Haley's Comet passed by when I was little. Terrified. I have no idea of what or why. I just remember sitting inside crying while everyone else was outside oohing and ahhing.

Come to think of it, I behaved much the same way about a meteor shower 7 or 8 years later.

I am happy to report I have almost fully recovered from that odd condition. My phobia of astronomical phenomena.

Wow. That sounds really scientific doesn't it? "Phobia of Astronomical Phenomena"

Maybe even fancy enough to distract you from the fact I said I have "almost" fully recovered. Yeah. We won't go there. Just know that sometimes me and the dark don't get along very well, astronomical phenomena or not.

Hmm. Didn't plan on divulging that little bit of information when I sat down. I was just going to tell you that I got Dale's Easter basket down today. He was playing in the back yard and I thought since it was already just one week until Easter it would be a good time to hide some eggs.

Want to guess how many plastic Easter eggs survived last spring to make it to this year?

Four.

Turns out that is a blessing in disguise. We took turns hiding and hunting.

My turn to hide them always involved a lot of peeking from Dale, some haphazard egg-tossing by me, and then a few hints for Dale as he hunted for the ones I had actually put a little effort into hiding.

His turn to hide went something like this:
"Hide you eyes, Mama. ....Okay! They are all hid! The orange one is right behind you! The blue one is in the shed! I'll get it. There's the pink one! Yep! You found the green one!"

The end.

A complete Easter egg hunt in less than 30 seconds.

I think many more than 4 eggs would have worn us both out.

And in other things springish... tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. Don't forget to wear your green!
I tried to make some shamrock pancakes this morning. You may notice there are no pictures.
Shamrocks are a tougher shape than I would have guessed.

They were some pretty ugly pancakes. But Dale didn't mind. Yay for preschoolers!

I'm off now to make sure I wear some pj's with green in them so I start off tomorrow on the right foot. I have always wanted to take the wearing green thing seriously.

And it always bothered me in elementary school when the teachers would pin little green construction paper shamrocks on all the kids who didn't wear green so they wouldn't get pinched all day. That is soooo cheating. Of course I understood why they had to do it. But still. It took all the fun out of it for the rest of us.

I won't even go into people trying to pass off some pretty shady colors as green. Or those who claim their green is on their underpants. Come on people. Surely you can do better than that!