Easter.

Another iteration of celebrating a holiday for something you don't believe in, but you do, but you don't, but who wants to miss out on everything, you know? Is it just for the kids or not?

I got the existential; I just ain't got the angst.

We cheerfully dyed eggs on Friday night. I like getting new kinds of egg dye as they come out; we invested in egg-dye stamps this year. I liked them, but they were a little tricky. The stamps were very spongy, and you had to roll them around a bit to get the whole stamp to show up. Honestly, I think Lee and Ray had more fun just painting dye on the eggs with the little brush.

On Saturday, I went shopping for food stuff. There was this cake at Rancho Liborio that I have been eyeing for quite some time, so I picked one up. The cake had chocolate icing and was shaped like a torte, with glazed strawberries and whatnot on top. Just...pretty. I asked the lady at the counter for one, and suddenly she goes, "You want that in a box, right?" with a panicked look on her face. The ensuing 10 minutes of looking for a box, not finding a box, sawing a big box in half, taping it together, retaping it together, figuring out that closing the box will squash the stuff on top...it gave me time to watch one of the pastry chefs assembling another cake. He had big squares of what looked like sponge cake, which he shook before dipping in some kind of liquid and slapping onto a cake board. A good half-inch of icing, then another layer of cake, and the whole mess was carried, just pouring liquid onto the floor, onto a cart to drip dry or something. Wow.

Lee and I stayed up late the night before to sow eggs (sow the egg...reap the deviled egg!) and candy. I fluffed up a pile of shredded colored paper (which, sadly, I had to buy, since the shredder at work is approved for classified documents, and the pieces end up looking like really ugly snow) and put out treats. To bed by midnight.

Awake by seven; Ray was searching our room for eggs. I asked her to wait until we're awake; she had trouble but managed to limit her search to our room while she waited.

Later, we did the treasure hunt, which was five riddles long. When she solved one, Lee presented her with a kids' movie. We spent most of the rest of the day watching movies, because Ray was sick with a cold (still from last week) and was pretty pooped. The movies were: Igor (meh), Barbie's Thumbelina (shoot me), the Tinker Bell Movie (surprisingly, a movie to inspire girls to be engineers), Bolt (pretty good), and Treasure Planet. We didn't get to Treasure Planet. I hadn't seen this many movies in one day since never or maybe-college-but-I-doubt-it.

Breakfast was peeps and hardboiled eggs. I've never seen anyone so enthusiastic for oversalted hardboiled eggs. I cooked the last of the baby artichokes, because that's what I like to eat with salt (and butter and lemon). And then I had cereal.

Lunch was Kraft macaroni and cheese.Ray's seven. So sue me; it's what she wanted.

Ray took a nap with me, which meant she really wasn't feeling well. She's had this cold since last week. This cold's a doozy. Personally, it's settled into my ears, which for some reason means I have to cough all night.

The cake was good but not more-than-normally moist; the frosting tasted, as Ray noted, "like chocolate ice cream."

Supper was potstickers and salt-and-pepper shrimp and mangoes and pineapple. I did not make the potstickers by hand; I knew she'd rather have me snuggle and eat popcorn than eat homemade. Which may be some kind of lesson about motherhood. A lesson for me, anyway--do less work; have more fun.

We wrapped her up and Made Her Brush Her TEETH and go to bed.

She was still sick today, so sick she stayed home from swimming lessons. But not so sick she couldn't eat little lemon cakelets and drink tea and watch Treasure Planet, apparently.

A gluttonous day: laying around all day, watching movies, eating what she liked, and being petted over to her heart's content. She's a good kid who probably enjoyed the last, best.