Team Abbott: Easter 2010

April showers brought Easter fun for the San Jose chapter of the Abbott clan. However, I did make the grossly huge mistake of putting off Easter candy and basket shopping until the night before Easter. That week just ended up being much busier than I had anticipated. And when I come home from work, I would much rather hang out with Mark than run around doing errands. All in all, a bad decision. I also didn't have time to run errands during the day on Saturday because General Conference was held the same weekend of Easter. We were busy watching the sessions, trying to get outside when we could, and making food. However, I had the genius idea of going to Walmart to shop for Easter supplies while Mark was attending the Priesthood Session that evening. Genius or insane. It seemed like a good idea, until I got into Walmart, found a shopping cart, and found the Easter aisle absolutely jam-packed with people and shopping carts, with limited amounts of candy strewn everywhere. So, a new plan formed. One that included not looking at prices and objectively deciding what to buy. No time for such nonsense when hundreds of people are pressing upon me and when the candy has all been unsettled and moved from its original resting place. So I just started throwing things in the cart, one for Mark, one for me. I made it down the first aisle after many moments of utter panic and despair. Freedom! Only to realize that I still needed baskets, plastic Easter eggs, and another candy run. I found a huge bin full of plastic Easter eggs that were just ridiculous looking... who wants comouflage eggs? Or real-looking bugs on their eggs? Where are just the normal plastic Easter eggs? Too tired to care much, I decided against them. After all, most of the candy I bought was individually packaged and didn't need plastic eggs. Maybe next year. Then in a moment of desperation, I decided to simply leave my full cart near the end of the aisle and make a quick run down the Easter aisle towards some surprisingly cute looking baskets and a few candy items that looked appealing. Once again, who has time for price checks? Miraculously, no one had disturbed my cart by the time I dug myself out of the crowds again. Thank goodness. I would have been even more aggrevated if I had to start all over again. After failing to find one or two other items on my shopping list, I finally left the store in disgust. Let me share these words of wisdom: never, ever, EVER go holiday shopping at Walmart the day before the holiday. Maybe not even a few days beforehand. If you're going for the cheaper Walmart prices, plan ahead. Otherwise, just buy candy somewhere else. After all, I ended up spending much more money than I had originally planned because of the intense craziness. Oh well, we do love our candy here! And yes, I will admit that we bought even more day-after-Easter-sales candy.

In years to come, perhaps we will fill each other's Easter baskets, like we do for Christmas stockings, but this year it was all me. I wanted to do it and thoroughly enjoyed the rush of preparing a basket for Mark. Not gonna lie... it wasn't so bad picking out candy for myself either. Well, because I prepared both baskets, I hid both of them in our bedroom (limited space in our small apartment) and made Mark find them both. He found his cheery yellow basket first (yellow is his favorite color after all).

Then he found my basket for me... yummy!

Mark enjoying his treasures!

A close-up of my basket of luciousness...

We also took time to decorate eggs together, something that I never really did often growing up. We actually tried to do this last year and even bought the egg dying kit and hard-boiled eggs. Three weeks later though, we still hadn't dyed the eggs and ended up throwing them out. This time we were better... we actually dyed the eggs! Of course, we did end up throwing them out a week or so afterwards. One step at a time...

Here's Mark with his favorite egg - LAKERS pride!