>Good Eggs, Bad Eggs

Today, we took the little ones to two Easter egg hunts, ten minutes apart and yet worlds away.

The first took place at a popular neighborhood park. It was free and widely publicized, filled with kids dressed in sweat shirts and jeans on what was a chilly morning, along with one poor kid in a “Christmas Story” style bunny suit. I had dresed Punky in her consignment sale finest, a boutique-style dress that probably cost someone $50, but that I had scored for $5 on half-price day. In other words, she looked adorable, but if she fell in a mud puddle or made good use of a permanent marker? No big deal. I digress.

We held our kids back from a field strewn with thousands of Easter Eggs and counted down the seconds until the whistle blew and children swarmed over the grass. There were so many eggs that I had envisioned it taking at least five minutes for all of them to be gathered up; this was the zero-to-three-years hunt, after all. Instead, the field was bare in 30 seconds flat. Punky scooped up a good 15 eggs on her own, but Hubs and I noticed more than one six-month-old slobbering over an Easter basket chock full of plastic eggs.

“I think some of the parents were helping a little too much,” Hubs murmured afterward. I laughed, imagining moms and dads scooping up eggs, their eyes gleaming with greed.

Afterward, we drove to the local botanical gardens, where we have a family membership. An entire Easter celebration was planned, complete with egg hunts every thirty minutes and various art stations where kids could decorate their own set of bunny ears, plant seeds, paint, and decorate the walkways with chalk masterpieces. We had driven from our own staid, middle class neighborhood into a bordering one that was an old money mecca, and it showed. Here, children ran about in designer frocks, dads strolled along in Princeton Lacrosse sweatshirts, and mommies idly swung thousand-dollar handbags from the crooks of their arms. I basked in the names I heard being called around me.

“Quentin, give your brother back his chocolate egg right this minute!”

“Cadence, get up off the grass, young lady! You’ll ruin that dress!”

“Benton! Benton! Put down that paintbrush!”

“Sara Bella, where did you put your Easter basket? You’d better not have lost it!”

The whole thing reminded me of a turn of the century stroll in the park, when the upper crust dressed in their finest and ambled about, nodding and smiling, seeing and being seen. I enjoyed the differences between the two events, at least until Punky and I were painting with vats of tempera paints on a wall made of brown paper. We had put a painter’s smock over her dress and she was wreaking primary colored havoc alongside a few other preschoolers. A little girl walked over to me as I watched. She was dressed only in an expensive sleeveless sundress. It was fifty degrees and windy, far too cold for any child not to be wearing a sweater. Her little red nose ran like a river.

“Can I paint?” she asked me.

“Well, you’ll have to ask your mommy,” I said from where I was kneeling beside her. “But I’m sure she’ll let you.”

“Oh, Anna Fayette Rose, let’s go make bunny ears, or look for eggs, or, or, watch a puppet show!” an impeccably dressed woman snorted from a few feet away. She hadn’t heard me, but had noticed her daughter eyeing the paints. “Anything but this mess!” Anna Fayette Rose looked longingly at the painting kids, then joined her mother.

That kind of thing drives me crazy. I continually see parents around here bringing their childen to kids’ events, dressing them inappropriately, then spending the whole time chastizing their children for trying to participate and “getting messy.” I gave up the battle against dirt smudges a long time ago. Living in this sanitized society, it won’t be too many years before my children are done forever with getting dirty; making messes is one of the greatest parts of being a kid, I think. Or maybe I’m just remembering too many Sundays and holidays and even school days in which I was overdressed and unallowed to get filthy.

At any rate, Punky and Bruiser both had a ball and by the time we’d dyed our Easter Eggs last night, they were more than ready for bed.

“Tonight, the Easter Bunny will come while you’re sleeping and leave presents!” I said to Punky as she put on her pajamas.

“But I thought Easter was passed!” she said with surprise. I laughed. Little did she know it had only just begun.