Oy, me. (Um, I sense a trend here of starting my posts with *sigh* sounds. I blame April.) Why must the excitement of one day lead to the fallout of the next?
Yesterday was HD's Easter Celebration at preK which included an egg hunt and a visit from the Easter Bunny. And, duh, goodies in plastic eggs. Each kid was asked to bring enough eggs for the class and then they hide those and somehow the teachers work their magic so everyone comes home with the same number of eggs. It doesn't matter what you put in them and I have seen anything from band-aids (we totally copied that for his Valentines this year) to bouncy balls to balloons (Smart! and so copying that one next year) to the standard chocolate or jelly beans. Harrison got to pick his egg stuffer this year and went for Hershey's chocolate eggs - a boy after his mama's heart, I guess. Plenty of other kiddos must be after my heart, too, because his basket came home loaded with sugar yesterday.
I've taken different approaches to The World of Sugar with my kids, but for the most part my philosophy for food is all things in moderation. We don't exclude much but we don't go overboard with much either (except all things bread and dough - again, HD is just like his mama when it comes to this). Yesterday, though, I decided to get the Sugar Coma over in one big rush. Because he's awesome, Harrison shared his goodies with his sister and with me and we opened every single egg; we ate all but two (there are only 15 kids in his class, so please don't think I let my kids eat 50 lbs. of sweets in one sitting). And actually? The kids weren't too bad after that. We had to listen to the Animal Actions songs about 100x so they could dance and run it all off, but I figured that was a small price to pay for not prolonging the whining for candy. I was, of course, wrong.
Why must there be a fallout? It's the same when we go on a trip or they go to spend a few days with the grandparents - the return home and re-acclimation is always rough. And apparently going to town on Easter candy is no exception. This morning wasn't pretty. No one finished even one bowl of cereal (HD usually has two or three and RL can have as many as five or six on any given day) and HD spent most of breakfast crying because he wanted the last two remaining eggs but I wouldn't let him have them unless he finished his cereal. And I mean, crying (and wailing and tears) the. whole. meal. And of course RL chimed in with, "Me want sucker! Me want suckerrrrrrrrr!" and her own little whiny tears. For the love of Pete, children. How many times do I have to tell them whining does not help their case?
Apparently forever times because they just kept going to the point that HD had to take a break in the action to go calm down by himself. Even though it was a bit of A Morning, I had to smile when RL followed him to his time out spot where he asked her, through sobs, "Raegan! How am I ever going to calm down?!?!" and she started singing Daniel Tiger's line "take a deep breath, and count to four!" to him. At least PBS and their yoga-lovin' mama are teaching them something, eh?
Of course I'm sure you've realized the real lesson learned here, right? Eat ALL the flippin' eggs the first time.
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