Monday, April 13, 2009

I'm not sure these children are mine

Here's something you would never seen in my childhood home.


It's a chocolate Easter bunny. In its entirety. Two.days.after.Easter.

TWO DAYS!

This is why I'm not sure these children are mine. No self-respecting Parsons would let a chocolate bunny see the sun set on Easter Day.

I grew up in a home that was absolutely Darwinian when it came to snacking. The strongest got the best snacks and if you showed any sign of weakness at all you would soon find yourself at the bottom of a heap and they would be eating your Ho-Ho.

Except you'd have lost the right to call it "your" Ho-Ho when you put it down on your plate to take a sip of your milk. You hesitated. Don't blame the shark for eating the wounded fish, it's what he was made to do.

My youngest sister Amanda was naturally at a disadvantage since by the time she came along there were already three sharks swimming the waters. She says that sometimes when a fray ended and she had once again gotten nothing she would climb up to the the cabinet and sneak herself a grape-flavored Flintstones vitamin.

She does have great teeth.

There was no hierarchy in our snacking power struggles. Adults got no more respect than kids. Once my mom bought a pie for Easter and she wrote "Don't Touch" on the top of the box. So naturally my two younger sisters ate it before the rest of us got up on Easter morning. When my mom discovered what they had done - I can still see here there in her bathrobe, gasping, pointing at "Don't Touch", saying something about Easter being a holy day and company and could we not show some restraint?! - they feigned wide-eyed innocence, swearing they thought that box top said "Don's Touch" and that that was the name of the bakery.

We were creative.

And we did well under pressure.

And thus I just cannot figure out how my own offspring have left this chocolate bunny on the table this long. There was another bunny, which they've eaten, so I know they know what it is.

Meanwhile there's a half-eaten pan of granola on the stove top. (Which by the way comes from Boomama and believe me it is every bit as delicious as she says it is!) (I prefer the baked oatmeal from Stretchmark Mama. But that's just me.)

Is it possible the hospital would have switched them both at birth?

2 comments:

Dalton Dorné said...

This is sooo funny, it just made my day. When I was young, my brother used to throw a fit over eating the candy. My parents forced us to have some restraint, we weren't allowed to eat it all at once. However, whatever didn't get eaten in the first round (easter morning) and throughout the day, faced a real challenge at night - my dad. So you had to eat the good stuff first, no saving it for later!

By the time my brother came around, they became so tired of fighting him, they would just let him eat it all in one sitting and get it over with (instead of having the fight for 3 days - rationing was really not an option for him). So he'd make himself sick and then he'd have to go lay down the rest of the morning. Not a bad idea really, when you live in the US, have three kids and no nanny!

I18n G.A.L. said...

Here in the land of sweets and chocolate that barely tastes like chocolate, Lauren gets so much that it's just another portion. "Easter eggs" here mean giant hollow milk chocolate eggs - no one messes with actual eggs. Lauren eats a few bites of the chocolate egg, then puts it down. She got more than 5 eggs (many come in a package with not just the egg but a couple of chocolate bars as well) last year, and those are still going. This year we told her grandmother not to get her an egg, so instead she got her the biggest chocolate bunny I have ever seen, still sitting on the counter. Heck, we don't even have a place to put them all, much less the capacity to eat them!