Christ Is Risen!

He is risen indeed!  Happy Easter Sunday.  Something about this particular Sunday and it's like a recharge for everyone in church service.  The worship is more alive and everyone seems so joyful.  It's wonderful. This year was no different.

As a family, we celebrate the Lord's resurrection, but we also do the Easter Bunny thing.  We try not to make it a main focus, but it is fun to watch our children excited about their gifts and for them to be able to equate the excitement of receiving a gift with the gift of our salvation.

This year, the kids each got three kinds of candy in their Easter baskets (and more in the plastic eggs we hid around the yard for the annual hunt): a chocolate bunny, a carrot-like sack of Reese's Pieces and a handful of Hershey's Bliss white chocolate eggs.  Traditional types of Easter candy I think -- less Peeps, which always go wasted in our household.  Ew.

It was fun to observe the kids dive into candy even before breakfast and to watch what they ate first and even how they ate it.  Here are my observations:

S ate only a couple of her white chocolate eggs and then carefully put her larger candies aside to dole out to herself later when she had a hankering.  We're near the end of the day and she has not touched anything else yet.  She reminds me of me, having some self-control about candy as a teen because I could use it to bribe younger sisters not to tattle or to do my chores.  Not sure she'll do either, but just the caution of saving her candy till later (in case) is something I understand.  She didn't do the egg hunt, so that was the extent of her candy observations.

H ate all of his white chocolate eggs right away.  Later in the day, he was munching away on his Reese's Pieces (not sure how far he got in the bag) and I think he's saving his bunny to eat secretly, at night, in his room.  Or something.  He ate all of the candy from his plastic egg finds immediately.

Z desperately tried ripping open his Reese's Pieces bag right away, but struggled and whined until I offered him help.  I opened the bag for him and he gobbled down at least a dozen or so pieces when he finally realized that they were not, in fact, M & Ms (as he'd thought) and had peanut butter in them.  His older brother made sure to point out ("duh") that the name of the candy was right there on the bag.  Later, Z hid in our homeschool room to eat all his egg hunt candy without commentary from nosy older brothers and left his wrappers all over the floor.  I made him clean them up when I discovered his little candy wrapper mess.

J quickly took her Palmer chocolate bunny from its box and exclaimed to the world how absolutely giant it was -- but that she'd seen bigger ones the size of a doll.  She was glad for the size she received.  Her first bite was from the bunny's feet and then the ears.  She ate the body, then set the head on the coffee table and announced that she had a bunny statue (more like an earless bust) and she was too full so who wanted it?  She had several volunteers, but I suggested she wrap it in a Ziploc and have the rest later.  She did.  She saved her other candy, but went sugar crazy with her egg hunt contents.

O ate most of his white chocolate eggs, had me open his Reese's Pieces for him so he could eat about three, then busted open his bunny box.  His first bite from the bunny -- once he got the foil off -- was a direct hit to the face with kind of a scary, carnivorous growling sound as he really tore away at the chocolate like he was starving and was getting his first bite to eat in a month.  With chocolate all around his mouth, he grinned his chocolate-toothed smile as if he'd conquered something fantastic.  Then he ate the rest of the bunny fairly quietly.  He was not highly competitive in the egg hunt and got fewer eggs than either J or his 4-year-old cousin, but he did manage to gobble most of that candy down pretty quickly.

I am not sure, but it seems that I might have predicted these candy habits of our children even before really watching them closely.  It all seems in character with their personalities.  Strange to think that Easter candy could reveal such things.

What's your favorite Easter candy?  Mine would probably fall in the dark chocolate category -- and I don't care what shape it's in!