What is this thing you call Easter?

So for the first time really in my life, I've 'celebrated' Easter. By that I mean we had Easter eggs and had a yummy breakfast and the day was a 'thing'. Last year we were at a friend's wedding in Melbourne that you may remember me writing about and Harriet had her first exposure to Easter and the novelty of an Easter egg hunt.

So since that experience, Harriet has asked about every month since - "When it's next Easter, can we please have our own egg hunt in the backyard? PLEASE?!". Oh yeah, THANKS Nick and Monica!

So we obliged. Easter eggs hidden, spotted around the garden (which I am still madly in love with) and a special Lindt chocolate rabbit with its own chocolate carrots too (i just knew she'd love that). Ted woke up about three minutes before the hunt began and within the first two minutes had managed to consume more chocolate than he had in all his days beforehand combined. Harriet had a total meltdown about the fact there were eggs ON DISPLAY and NOT HIDDEN (and went down on all fours to furiously devour an egg in a show of why being five and a half is more than enough to test my patience at the moment). She calmed down enough to be shown that in fact there *was* a hunt, that there *were* hidden eggs and shock horror she couldn't know that straight away because some were *hidden*. (sigh, if there is an easy way to fast forward to seven, which I've heard is easier, could you please let me know?)

Jan and Mike have just finished their long awaited stay in Sydney - unfortunately I didn't get a chance to take too many photos when they were here because we were out and about and
my lens is a little on the prohibitively massive size. I did take a shot of us all on their last day here though - check it out. I think I only needed take about five photos before I got a good one which is almost unheard of in a group photo.

I'm a bit worried that we've now set ourselves up with a precedent. Damn it! I need to remember to under-deliver, keep expectations low!

Last night Harriet and Ted decided that sleep was for chumps, and were up dancing around with what Ted calls his 'dancing rope' (aka a yellow shoelace) to Lola by The Kinks (and in an aside Harriet asked James today what "ole so and so" means; turns out she meant 'Old Soho' in the song, bwahaha!). Wow, long, rambling sentence there. So, the children were singing, dancing with ropes and generally being merry, so James and I settled down at the table with the holiday crossword. Slowly the two children migrated over to where we sat and Harriet, intrigued as always by our activity, drew up her own 'crossword'. It consisted of a page of squares with squiggles in them and not much else. So I showed her what makes up a crossword and drew up a simple one for her to complete. She asked why there weren't numbers in all of the squares and what order you had to do the answers in and once she got on top of the basic precepts she was off and racing. James and I drew up another three crosswords for her before the night was over with increasingly 'difficult' questions.

Tomorrow for news at school, after having had her grandparents here, going to swimming lessons, going to Luna Park, the Easter Show, Wildlife World, eating out nearly every night (*ouch*) and , after all that, Harriet told me tonight that tomorrow for news she wants to take in her crossword and teach the children in her class how to do one. NERD! YAY!

Oh and Ted loves his glow in the dark pyjamas so much that he wore them for about 72hrs straight. I finally peeled them off him and he kept asking where they were and why his other pyjamas don't glow and when can he have his space glow pyjamas back again? He also needs to approve his outfits before putting them on in a way Harriet never did and was beyond excited to finally have a pair of plastic clogs like Harry. In fact one of his catchphrases is "Do it like Harry".

ps - The pronoun thing is definitely here to stay. He's so grown up now. Harriet's pronoun confusion was a source of miscommunication for a while but looks like we've sidestepped that with Ted. He counted to twelve unprompted the other night, sang the alphabet song in full and keeps saying "Line down, then line across" as he tries valiantly to write a proper 'T'. So he seems to be on track for his developmental milestones. He also speaks very clearly, even the grandparents could understand him without interpretation!