Easter

I have a couple of topics rolling around inside of my head today, both have to do with Easter but are pretty much unrelated. Why do we spend countless hours and take many a opportunity to teach our children not to lie (and by god do not go around talking about imaginary thoughts as if they were reality) while at the same time we pound it into their malleable minds that there is a ginormous rabbit who visits annually to drop off TOO much candy and "prizes" they do not need? My youngest is TERRIFIED of the Easter bunny, just the mention of him gets the child rambling about how he won't come into our house he will just leave the basket (or the sand pail as in the case of my children for the past 3 years) outside. Tel is completely afraid of this huge bunny (he has seen the "real" Easter bunny at the annual main street park Easter egg hunt they have in our "city"); but what is not to fear. We have had rabbits on our pseudo farm before and the kids have held them, fed them, and accidentally released them from their bunny prison to enter bunny hell which consists of running their asses off trying to get away from the common stray dog; but at no time did we have a pet rabbit the size of their father. We have had animals grow to uncommon sizes, but come on! I assured Tel that the Easter bunny would only leave his basket and not bother him at all--" there is no reason to worry, you've seen Quin (our border collie) chase the rabbits in the hills" (this did bring about deep gut killing laughs out of the child and all was well). This leads to my second topic of the evening: what the bunny brought. I am sick of my children accumulating SHIT! The stocking shit, the McDonald's shit, the birthday goodie bag shit, the "grandma gave me a surprise" shit--ALL the shit. So this Easter I was determined to stock the basket, aka pail and shovel, with something they would use rather than stuff in a toy bin to be forever forgotten. Both boys received Discmans (I know, outdated with MP3's and all but come on: 8 years old and 3 years old) and a CD. Great idea especially because we went camping 3 hours away and the ride home after devouring half of the chocolate contents in said pail would've been more than mommy could handle. My eldest got a CD with various 1970's famous guitar rock songs on it, ever since the "Guitar Hero" addiction he has been a huge fan of "oldies" (as he says, I am not quite old enough to categorize them as such), Tel got a 2 disk compilation of Easter/Kids songs. Tel put on his headphones and we didn't hear a word from him until we got home and since we've been home if the headphones are on he only communicates to us if we are bothering him. Discman=great idea for baskets!!