The day started with the Evil Easter Bunny only almost making the Kyla and Wes cry. It did take them an hour (while Dwayne and I slept) to find the 6 eggs that hid the clues they needed to find their Easter Baskets, which then took another half hour. We dressed up to do Church on the Couch, before making brunch.

Piper helped me make our traditional Bunny Bread (his lucky rabbit’s foot already eaten by Wes), and then Piper helped Dwayne make the devilled eggs. She also took all Saturday to make Bunny Cake, so she was kinda of Easter Dinner’s MVP!

Grandma wound the kids up and turned our peaceful home into chaos. That’s my telling of the story, anyway.

Happy Easter, Friends and Family!

Piper spent hours making this cake from Cake My Day!

Here’s the original intent, with the surprise carrots hidden in the middle when you cut it.

Piper’s actually came close (no “Nailed It” disasters here):

We are waiting to cut the cake until after Easter dinner tomorrow, but she already had to make due by making her own fondant carrots (which looked great!). The original recipe calls for using a fake candy called “peas and carrots” which can barely be found in the “other sellers” section of Amazon. The hours she put into this cake will make dessert eggstra special tomorrow!

Wes got into the action a bit when he played with the marshmallows as well.

I made meatloaf “cupcakes” for dinner, but Kyla wanted to make sure we celebrated a little better, so we woke up to extra friends:

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1	Things You Kiss Goodbye, The	Leslie Connor	Just when I thought I “got” the author.  While not as good as the other 3 books, I still had to finish this one.
2	Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	500 pages of good, yet not uplifting storytelling, of 5 generations of a Korean family, mostly in Japan.
3	Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell, #6), An	Deanna Raybourn	Brilliant vocab;
4	Hench	Natalie Zina Walschots	Even Villians need secretaries, and an Excel spreadsheet and a brilliant hench may discover the gray area between heroes and villians.  Kyla and I each give it a thumb up.
5	In A Glass Grimmly	Adam Gidwitz	Funny and twisted, fitting sequel.
6	When Stars are Scattered	Victoria Jamieson & Omar Mohamed	Graphic Novel of a Kenyan Refuggee camp, orphaned Somalian children on own, true story
7	Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America	Ijeoma Oluo	Oh, oh, hard truths about being white.  It takes a brave white man to read this…but it takes a brave black woman to live this.
8	Just Us	Claudia Rankine	A perfect reading complement to Mediocre.  Ouch, I need to rethink why I dye my hair.  And more signficant topics, of course.
9	Invisible Life of Addie LeRue	Victoria Schwab	Even stones….  Wow, blown away by clever take “making a deal with the devil”.  Want to talk about the love “love” story…. A book I want everyone to experience. Kyla agrees.
10	The Uglies	Scott Westerfeld	Ended on a cliff hanger and no desire to read 2nd book.
11	Out of My Mind	Sharon Draper	A girls with cerebral palsey goes from inside her bright head to sharing herself more with a talking device–and the pain that can involve with her “normal” peers.  A “social justice” book for school–devastating consequences.
12	Joy at Work	Marie Kondo	Spark Joy at work?  Fine.  I do love a tidy place.

Papa has introduced Wes to Star Wars and finally Wes is hooked. So his latest blanket fort is really a TIE fighter, complete with Nerf machine gun and hidden weapons cache.

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Then he takes a break and makes Kyla’s life harder. His work here is done.

Piper swiped Kyla’s umbrella again, but this time for a good cause.

Both Dwayne and I crushed on Ernie the Grumpy Gargoyle when we first laid eyes on him earlier this month. I brought him home yesterday to the newly completed pedestal.

Timmy Whitefoot is very suspicious of this new could-be-cat.

I think there’s a resemblance!

At one time, I must have dreamed parenthood was regularly like this and quickly learned I was an idiot. But today, my parents came over to bring Piper (and Timmy Whitefoot) the cat tree my dad made for the proud cat owner.

My parents walked into this scene. All the kids are happily working on brain-enhancing activities. Kyla was soldering the mechanism of her useless box, Wes was programming, and Piper was digging out gems from a kit she got for her birthday. I record this because this has never happened before and I’ve been a mom for 14.5 years. Not that this quiet, productive bliss lasted that long. By the time Dwayne and I returned from a long walk with my parents, they had all scattered to their usual corners and pursuits. But at least I had caught it on camera!