Well, I had a perfectly lovely long weekend.

Friday, Penny's daycare had an Easter Egg "hunt" for the littlest kids in the playground. Hunt is in quotes because the eggs weren't hidden. At all. They were sort of dumped in the middle of the playground, and then when the signal was given, the toddlers were released.

Matt had gone to watch and take pictures and help out. He was holding Penny when they went outside, and as soon as he said, "eggs" she started squirming and pushing and trying to get down to get to the eggs.

She picked up an egg in each hand. And then managed to scoop an egg into the crook of each elbow. And then she reached the fifth egg... Defeated, she just sat down. (Matt tried to convince her to put the eggs in the plastic bucket he was holding for her. She was having none of it. Get your own eggs, Dad!)

So she came home with five plastic eggs and a little bucket-and-shovel set, and some other cute little things from daycare. By the time she got home, apparently, Penny had made the connection with the eggs and the bucket, and so she played with them for most of the evening.

She put the eggs in the bucket, and dumped them out again. Many time. Then she tried to use the shovel like a spoon to scoop up the eggs. (We did not discourage this, as she still needs much practice with her spoon.) This led to this amusing scene:

Then she discovered that the eggs could be opened. Two things happened: First, she learned a new word: broke. (Though Penny's rendition sounds exactly like the trill she uses in lieu of the word more. "Brrrr?!") And second, she invented a new game. She'd pop an egg open, and tell me it was broke, then hand it to me to put back together. (Thank goodness the eggs were hinged.)

The one time I tried to just leave the egg broken, she very deliberately picked up my hand, turned it over, and put the broken egg into it, which was good for a laugh.

That game lasted for at least twenty minutes before it mutated into something else.

There was candy in the eggs, we discovered. We also were reminded that Penny - being her mother's child - really likes chocolate. She almost managed to bite off a piece of Mr. Goodbar... through the foil/paper wrapper.

She spent all day Saturday playing with the eggs, too. Even when we went down to visit my parents and leave Penny with them to run an errand, she insisted on hauling along a couple of her eggs. Of course, when we got to my parents' house and she discovered that my mom had shiny eggs, she quickly abandoned hers.

Even her beloved balloon did not distract her from the eggs!

Matt and I dyed (real) eggs on Saturday. I didn't take any pictures because the kit I'd bought included this very pretty metallic paint that was supposed to be dotted onto the eggs with their special rubber doohickey... but the paint glopped, and then took way too long to dry, so all the eggs that I bothered trying to paint with the silvery stuff all turned out kind of smeared and nasty-looking.

Next year, I'm going for the basic kit - just dye and a couple of wax crayons. Maybe a shrinky-dink or two.

(Especially since Penny may feel the need to help, next year.)

Then Matt and I went to the store. "Hey, while we're here, we could get some Easter candy!" Matt suggested brightly.

I tried to be cool. "Nah, I don't think so."

"NO?"

"We really don't need any."

Matt looked at me as if he was about to demand who was I, and what had I done with his wife. I sighed. "I might've already bought some," I admitted. "It was supposed to be a surprise."

(On the other hand, when I'd gone shopping for the Easter candy before, I hadn't been able to find any black jelly beans, which are Matt's favorite, so we bought some anyway.)

Sunday, of course, was Easter. Before I even got up, Matt had introduced Penny to the black jelly beans. (Ew...) So she was good and sugared-up already when I came down with the family basket.

She dove into the basket with enormous enthusiasm. She came up with a Cadbury egg clenched in each fist. "Um, no, sweetie, those are for Mommy and Daddy."

I emptied the basket of all the stuff I'd got "for Mommy and Daddy." She grabbed the stuffie Peep, kissed it twice, and then realized that all the little eggs still in the basket... were chocolate!

She had about eight of them before she even got dressed, and smeared chocolate all over the stuffie Peep. And then had a real egg for breakfast. Then she focused on the DVD I'd gotten for her.

"EH-BOH! EH-BOH! EH-BOH!" She was pointing triumphantly at Elmo.

I was flabbergasted. Where did she learn that? She's only seen Sesame Street maybe four times, and she usually gets bored with her other Elmo DVD in about ten minutes. But she was insistent. "EH-BOH! EH-BOH! EH-BOH!"

The package promised the show was "about 30 minutes," but it was actually three mini-shows, the sum of which was closer to 45 minutes. Penny watched, rapt, until about halfway through the second, then climbed off my lap and sat on the floor to play with her eggs some more.

But when the show was over and I was putting it away, she ran up to me and pointed at the box. "EH-BOH!" (She kept it up, too. Every time she wandered by the DVD rack Sunday and Monday, she'd point at Kermit on the Muppet DVDs and make her not-really-a-ribbit noise, and then she'd point up at the very top rack, where we keep her DVDs, and say, "EH-BOH! EH-BOH! EH-BOH!")

Matt and I stopped giving her candy around 9:30, so the high wore off and she crashed into a nap right on time at noon. After she woke up, we put her in her Easter dress and hauled her down to my parents' again.

(I couldn't get her to keep a hat on her head for more than about two seconds, but she did wear her little necklace for quite a while.)

At my parents', we had more chocolate and more food and still more food and more chocolate and even more food and then they filled in all the cracks in our stomachs with ice cream and cobbler. Penny was full nearly to bursting when we left - my dad, wanting to make sure no one cheated his grandaughter of her rights, had given her a second helping of ice cream, as large as any of the adult scoops.

An anecdote, though. Lest you think she's not yet capable of fully grasping concepts... I filled a cup with milk from my parents' fridge and gave it to her. She took a couple of pulls, then held it up to me. "Brrrr?! Brrrr?!"

"I just filled it, you don't need more yet, sweetie."

"Brrrr?! Brrrr?!"

I took the cup from her. Sometimes the valves don't work quite right. I took a pull from it, myself, to test - and it tasted like watery sour cream. The milk had turned.

Now, whether she was asking for "more," or telling me the milk she had was "broke," I'm not sure, because they both come out as "Brrrr?!" But I poured the sour milk out, and opened the fresh jug (and tested it to make sure - my parents don't drink milk much) and gave it back to her. She took a pull, to be sure, then happily wandered off sucking back her milk.

Monday was my day - I kissed Matt and Penny and sent them off to work and daycare, then spent most of the day doing my own thing. I made some good progress on my standing scrapbook projects, and did some household chores, and went out for lunch, and watched a movie... It was quite, quite lovely.

--Liz