My Easter Story

We like to tease our children. Sometimes we forget to tell them later that we were teasing. It happens. Yesterday, Drew began to teach Israel about Easter egg hunts. “Mommy and Daddy get plastic eggs that open and they stuff them with candy and hide them for us.” Andrew and I looked at each other with glints in out eyes and gave her the crazy look and pretended to not know what she was talking about. “Plastic… eggs? Fill them with stuff?” (It really does sound ridiculous so it was easy to pretend that it is.) She gets this smile and rolls her eyes in the “Oh goodness, here they go again,” way. So for a while Andrew and I pretended to be more and more confused with each of her explanations. “So what is in these PLASTIC eggs? Chicks? Who lays these eggs? Plastic chickens?!” “You must have dreamed this, Drew. It sounds really strange.” Israel is young enough that he doesn’t quite remember last year so even though he tried to be on Drew’s side (any side that includes candy is good) he was more easily confused.

After they went to sleep last night, I was putting treats into those plastic eggs that I had previously denied the existence of. Suddenly I realized and said, “Oh, Andrew, we forgot to tell the kids we were kidding. Oops.” But then I had another idea later so I decided to extend the joke. This morning I started, “So, your dad and I found some of those plastic egg things you were talking about. My only question now is that you were talking about ‘stuffing them?’ Do you stuff them like you stuff a turkey?” There was a chorus of nos. “Ok, ok, then you must stuff them with stuffing like a stuffed animal, right? Fluffy white stuff?” The kids again asserted a negative and said candy was to go in the eggs. I expressed my doubt again about the whole concept. “But, guys, what do candy stuffed eggs have to do with Easter? Did Jesus hand out eggs with candy in them after He rose from the dead? I don’t think so!” I was really having way too much fun with this. Drew asserted that Christmas trees have nothing to do with Jesus’ birth. That backfired quickly though as I seemed to ponder that and then said maybe we shouldn’t do Christmas trees anymore. Then she kept telling me, “But, Mommy, it’s just transition. Is that the right word, transition? When you do something every time. Yes, it’s transition, Mommy.” By that time I was laughing out loud, hard. When I could muster it, I explained the word was tradition.

Well, the joke is over. As they were walking away from the hunt I asked them if they liked it when we tease them. Drew said “Yes!” and Israel said, “No!” at the same moment. It is fun. We love that our kids are growing up with awesome senses of humor and that we all love to have fun together and spend time together. Hope you are having a lovely day celebrating that He is risen too!

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