Katyboo1’s Weblog

So, March already eh?  Well, let’s hope it has a lot more lovely things to offer than the fact that a) it isn’t February and b) we’re going away on its last day.  Naturally the children are very pro March as a month because it’s got Easter in it this year, and they’re hoping for much chocolate, as usual.  They’re always hoping for chocolate, but Easter is the only legally compulsory chocolate buying time of year in the calendar, and as such, much must be made of it, at least in our house anyway.

I must say that I only ever buy them those teeny, tiny eggs, and spend their egg money on something Easterish but which isn’t going to mean spending a fiver on an egg and a thousand pounds at the dentist.  This is not actually because I am a good, health conscious parent.  It’s more to do with the fact that eggs are so cheap that everyone buys children Easter Eggs, even if they only met them once at a bus stop, and if you buy them some too, and you have three children, you could actually open a branch of Thorntons in your hallway come Easter Sunday.  Somebody has to draw the line somewhere and it’s me.

It’s some kind of weird adult compulsion, this egg buying business.  I expect it has a lot to do with BOGOF’s and Three for Two’s actually, and nothing at all to do with a deep seated need to celebrate pagan fertility rites thinly disguised as Christian festivals.  It also has something to do with the fact that if you randomly get rid of the two eggs you didn’t really want to buy, but couldn’t resist because they were such a bargain, it saves you piling on four stone on your own in the house over the Easter weekend, compulsively watching Tony Curtis and Kurt Russell in Spartacus whilst wiping bits of creme egg off your chin.

As with most major festivals I am a bit of a bah humbug when it comes to such things.  I don’t mind things like Easter bonnets, and rustled up a splendid one for Tilly one year. I got quite competitive about it actually.  She got bored rigid by the whole thing after twenty minutes of faffing around with some cardboard and ribbon.  I really got the bit between my teeth and three days later came up with what can only be described as a creation which was truly bonnetacular.  Philip Treacey would have been proud of it.  It was something you would expect to see Tara Palmer Tompkinson parading around a paddock in on Ladies Day at Ascot.  Tilly was, naturally, totally unimpressed, but I took a picture of it with my phone and sent it to all my friends and got much kudos!  I was really looking forward to when Tallulah had to do the same thing, and had my design all planned out.  As it was they must have gotten bored of that idea by the time she hoved into view and nobody has ever asked us to make another one, much to my disappointment.  I really feel that it could have been my new forte.

Things I don’t like about Easter are, a) the fact that it now starts in about November and ends some time in May, b) hot cross buns (urgh, currants and bread, urghhh!), c) Lent (???), d) Simnel Cake (looks great, tastes like crap.  Marzipan is evil, bad and wrong), e) hard boiled eggs (smell like farts).  The other thing is rabbits.  Why, why, why rabbits? 

Rabbits, unbeknownst to most of the population, are evil things.  My gran had a killer rabbit, just like the one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  It was forever leaping out of bushes going for people’s jugulars.  It was called Peter, but it was really the spawn of satan with a bobtail.  It was a hideous little beast.  My brother and I had rabbits and all they ever did was scratch and bite us, crap on us and constantly escape from the garden.  The only thing we liked them for was the fact that they were good at starting digging bloody big holes that we could  continue with and not get into trouble for trashing the lawn with, because we could blame the rabbits.  Other than that, what was the point of them say I?  They also don’t taste very nice.  Too sweet for my liking.  Oh!  I hate Spartacus as well.  Tony Curtis never did it for me. I always preferred Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.

So, basically the only good things about Easter are chicks, hats and chocolate.  I’m also very fussy about my chocolate.  I will eat most types of chocolate, but if someone is going to go to the trouble of buying me an egg, then I want what I want.  Mostly what I don’t want are Cadbury’s Creme Eggs.  I can’t help it.  I have tried and tried to like them.  I finally gave up on the regular sized ones a few years ago.  Last year I tried one of the little ones, and I hate those too.  Apparently they do vast ones as well.  I just can’t imagine how tooth achingly sweet those would be.  I don’t actually know if the giant ones are filled with that creamy goo or not.  If they were it would be compulsory to wear some kind of all in one protective suit whilst eating it surely?  Otherwise you would just end up welded to the kitchen cabinets with rotted stumps for teeth.  Urghh!

The best Easter Eggs, as any fule kno, are other peoples! I’d rather eat the children’s when they’re at school thanks!  I do remember the first Easter Egg I ever had though.  I was very small, must have been two or three at the most.  It was a Freddy Frog one, which had mini egg type eggs inside it and Freddies on either side of it.  I remember it so distinctly because the shell of the main egg was so hard that my dad had to bring in a hammer from the tool shed to smash it with and it was quite traumatising!  Another year I got a little willow basket with tiny eggs in.  I think that was my favourite of all time.  I had the basket for years and years.  It may even still be kicking around at mum’s somewhere.  She hates throwing things out.  She’s probably using it as a handy string holder or something.

Right.  So that’s Easter covered, and March has only just begun.  I’m getting the marketing bug of discussing these things early.  On Easter Sunday I will probably be discussing what I’m going to do with myself on the longest day of the year, and by the time Whitsun rolls round I shall be making plans for my Fireworks party.  It’s all a bit too scary really.

Talking of which, we went to Norwich today.  We’re having a weekend going to visit the in-laws, before we jet off to Canada.  We stay in a hotel in Norwich because despite the fact that Jason’s mother says she wouldn’t mind our noise, her house is very small and we are very large and very noisy.  I am convinced that she says that she doesn’t mind the noise because it has been so long since she has had kids herself that she has forgotten how much one does mind the noise when being woken from restful slumber at half past three in the morning because the entire rest of the household has had to get up and do what seems like a percussion and voices version of the Hokey Cokey in the hallway for several hours.

The children love staying in the hotel.  It has a guest suite with its own garden, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a lounge/kitchen type affair.  They think it’s the height of decadence to get in their pyjamas and zoom around the garden, and then get up the next day and eat breakfast in the restaurant.  I have to say that I still think eating breakfast in a restaurant is a pretty exciting affair.  It was last time we went, mainly because Matilda emptied an entire fried breakfast onto her lap in a moment of critical absent mindedness.  I am almost sure that the staff will remember us from last time.  I just hope they don’t hold it against us…