Traveling Off the Moral Highroad

Easter is the one holiday for which we stay home rather than traveling out-of-town to spend the day with family. We travel to eat Thanksgiving dinner with two or three families. At Christmastime we open our personal family presents at someone else's house, under someone else's tree. While I love both sides of my family and, for the most part, enjoy celebrating holidays with all of them, I appreciate watching the girls' Easter basket excitement in our own cozy home.

We prepared for Easter Mass that morning without worrying that we had left a pair of shoes...or an entire suitcase as we did a previous holiday. I only screamed at someone once or twice. Great Easter attitude, huh? I guess that's a downfall for my family: I'm more self-controlled when others are watching.

After rising at 5:00 a.m. to fill Easter baskets with crap lovely treats I had purchased from Dollar General at 7:45 the previous evening, then dressing for and attending Mass, I took a nap. A much-needed nap. That is, until the neighbor decided to rev his four-wheeler engine over and over while sitting in his driveway. Argh.

We concluded our Easter family day by playing frisbee golf in Parsons, then running and climbing at the park. Actually, Carl and the girls played frisbee golf. I rode my Hoveround around, trying to keep up while simultaneously jarring every joint in my body and freezing in the 40-ish, windy weather. I also sat in the Tahoe to observe playground time from a warm afar, wishing I had my laptop to record things. I couldn't even find a pencil.

The girls played tag with some other kids. Evidently Hailey called time-out every time someone neared tagging her, which prompted Katie to call her a quitter. Of course, Katie couldn't simply call her a quitter one time. She had to expand upon all the times Hailey had quit in the past ten years, until Hailey started to cry. How this celebrated the resurrection of Christ, I don't quite know.

Hailey yelled something unidentifiable at Katie. After a brief pause Hailey hollered, "Mo-om! Katie stuck her tongue out at me!"

Jesus, can you resurrect me right on up there with you, please?

Katie replied, "I could have meant it in a good way." At that, I had to laugh.

We ended the day with a high class meal from Sirloin Stockade, then pilfered some daffodils from the roadside on the way home. We started the day on the moral high road, but somewhere along the way we got off. Happy late Easter!