Bunny wad blowing

Easter is scary this year.  Not the entire holiday, mind you, but the small piece of it loaded into the back of my minivan.  Sigh.

A helpful tip:

If you leave your Easter shopping until the Friday before Easter, and then you leave it until nighttime, and then you have to wait for your husband to bring back the minivan because he drove it to a “business meeting” at a brewpub that runs long (surprise!), and the other car is hooked up to the soapbox trailer (which you don’t know how to back out of the driveway), and you are exhausted from forgetting to fall asleep the night before, and then you feed the girls but your stomach has that irritated “I don’t want to eat until I get to sleep for a while” feeling, and so you don’t eat, and then you end up in the Easter display aisles at Target, sleep deprived and starving and crabby and carrying a migraine aura at about 8:00 pm?

My tip is to try to avoid that in your own lives, because it is a recipe for disaster.

My brain was overwhelmed, and I just started tossing stuff in the cart that I thought I might want to eat.  Chocolate?  Shiny wrappers?  Cute shape?  Bunnies?  Sweet?  Value-pack?  Need, need, need, need, need.  Plus some Easter grass.  Ten bags of that plastic shredded garbage-y filler. . . is that too much?  I think it might be.  It’s not going to be a green Easter at our house, apparently.  Sorry, world.

I couldn’t find Easter baskets that I liked.  All of the crappy baskets remaining for us last minute shoppers were, well . . . crappy.  So I started wandering the store in search of something more creative. A container that would be cute and colorful and useful after the holiday had passed.

I wandered and wandered and wandered, unable to make my brain focus on anything.  I could feel one of those, “you have forgotten to eat or sleep” migraines coming on, and every light in the store seemed to be pulsating and reaching out to me  in an ominous “your head is going to hurt so fucking much” sort of way.  Yay!

I found more candy, though.  Need that.

Focus.  Easter baskets or a reasonable facsimile.  I wandered.  Maternity: nothing.  Gardening: nothing.  Electronics: nothing.  My eyes hurt.  I dug into the bottom of my purse and found what I am pretty sure was an Advil.  Swallowed it.  I put on my sunglasses, which made me waaaaaay cool.  In Target.  At night.  Pushing a huge cart of candy and earth-killing plastic grass through the store.

A few people gave me weird looks.  I’m pretty sure they thought I was a movie star.  It’s not nice to ignore your fans, so I waved at them.  Good practice for when I really become famous and have actual fans pointing at me in Target.

Migraines suck.  The ceiling lights were talking to me now, making seductive suggestions about how lovely it would be to lie down on the cool tile Target floor and take a little nap.  Must . . . resist . . . fetal . . . position.

FOCUS!

I had just reached the point where I was starting to consider that the Oregon Easter Bunny might be the sort of quirky guy who would deliver Easter goodies in a kitchen garbage bag, when I had an inspiration.  I raced my cart through the store, and there they were!  The perfect Easter baskets!  They are cute and colorful and re-usable and perfect.  And only $5.99 each!  Score!

I grabbed two of them.

Easter Trash Baskets

Brilliant, I know.

Ok, so let me break it down.

The Easter baskets were $5.99 each.  So that’s $11.98.

The Easter grass was 25 cents a bag, so that’s $2.50.

That’s $14.48 total.  With me so far?  There’s no sales tax here in Oregon, remember.

I bought nothing else except Easter candy.  Nothing.  No toys, no stuffed bunnies, no jewelry, no glitter.  Nothing.

And the grand total when I checked out?

$83.75.

For those of you doing the math in your head and having trouble, I will save you some time and just let you know that this means that I spent $69.27 on candy.  My head hurt too much to consider giving some of it back.

$69.27.

That seemed like a lot.  I swiped my debit card ok’ing the $83.75 total with as much movie-star confidence as I could muster.  Because I so meant to buy that much candy.

$69.27 worth of candy.

When I shared this bit of financial information with Mark last night, his eyebrows actually elevated off his forehead and floated above his head for a second.  Like a cartoon.

Or maybe that was a migraine hallucination.  It seemed real.

So today . . . I brought the baskets in so that I could take a picture and share them with you (because I think that part of my shopping trip was genius), but I left the Target bags filled with candy in the car.  It’s all still out in the car, because I just don’t want to deal with it yet.

Later’s good.

I am curious to see what the girls think of the Oregon Easter Bunny.  I will probably have to offer explanations.  The California Easter Bunny usually brings small toys or jewelry or clothing, but the Oregon Easter Bunny blew his wad in the candy department.  I probably won’t use the phrase “blew his wad” while explaining to the girls how different Easter Bunnies make different choices . . . but I’m sure the girls will understand.

On the up-side, I’m pretty sure I have enough goodies to fill their baskets.

And on the other up-side, they’ll have a container in which to place all of the Easter garbage.

Because geez, why did I buy all that plastic grass?

Famous people need a lot of plastic grass.

Apparently.