Adventures in Parenting #42: First Easter

I've written before about the traditions we create as families and how those evolve over the years as the familial unit changes. According to my social media feeds, most of you celebrate Easter by going to church then finding a field and/or highway median in which to take a family picture. This was our first Easter with the Coop, though I did have to think about that given the seemingly random nature of the Easter schedule. (Side note: Pick a date, Easter. Be a given date or at least a given week. I've looked up the reasoning behind the Easter date about 100 billion times and I immediately forget it every time so I'm beyond knowing this or caring. Pick a date, Easter!) With that in mind, we decided we'd create a new Easter tradition for our family. Step 1.) Sleep in to an embarrassing hour. We churched it up on Saturday night, stayed up late partying (read: "watching Shark Tank"), and celebrated the resurrection of Christ by sleeping so hard that people might have thought I was dead.

Step 2.) Don't see our child until noon. In keeping with step 1, we left the King Baby with my parents on Saturday night and didn't retrieve him until after lunch. So far, our Easter tradition is delightful.

Step 3.) Yell at the TV, cry a little, and lament the loss of Tyson Chandler for the 405th time. It's great to have the Mavs back in the playoffs, obviously, but there is a direct correlation between their games and the number of times I pace around the room, curse the refs, and wonder why I ever started watching sports in the first place.

Step 4.) Present Cooper with an (hastily thrown together) Easter basket that he has no idea what to do with. Side note: Did we recycle all of the eggs he came home with from his various daycare facilities and pretend like we were good parents who packed the eggs themselves? Yes, yes we did.

Step 5.) Watch as Cooper ignores all of the stuff in his Easter basket in order to point at his dog who is howling incessantly.

Step 6.) Take 87 pictures (an actual, literal number) trying to get that one where he's actually looking at the camera and not confused about being outside for, like, the third time in his entire life. We're TV people.

Step 7.) Capture the moment where Cooper inevitably begins to eat the eggs. We all knew this was coming, right?

Step 8.) Force the increasingly grumpy child to take a nap.

Step 9.) Do a ton of yard work for some reason.

Step 10.) After an insanely long nap, force Cooper to get up so that there's still a chance he'll sleep through the night and take pictures, while laughing, of him stumbling around the room like a drunk on St. Patrick's day. He seriously could not keep his abnormally large head up and just spent an hour flopping around like a rag doll. He laughed while being tickled and then whined the rest of the time. Parenthood!

Step 11.) Cook a delicious Easter meal. And by that I mean, of course, order Papa John's.

Step 12.) Discover that, after having spent more time outside in one day than he'd ever spent outside total in his entire life, and after having had his world pumped full of excitement and demands for smiles, Cooper will turn into a complete mess by 7:30. Put the weeping, angry, exhausted child into his pajamas and put him to bed but not before taking the picture that will forever hallmark his first Easter.

Step 13.) Watch The Amazing Race.

Maybe in future iterations of this tradition, the Mavs will win, Brian