An Easter Bunny, a pear and an epiphany...

Did you ever plan to go take pictures (at JC Penney or Sears or something like that) only for everything to go wrong and all the pictures to have at least one kid screaming or crying, if not everyone including you? Well, yesterday I thought maybe, just maybe if it's not planned but spur of the moment, maybe it will work! After our morning play date, Josh and Alli were dressed cute and in pretty good moods, so I called around to get an appointment at a photo studio and got one (it was going to be a little tight for time, the studio was about a 40 minutes drive, but I thought that would give them time to have a power nap in the car which would perk them right up for fabulous pictures!!!)

Flash forward to about 1 hour and 10 minutes later, I'm rushing through the mall in hopes that the studio (who shall remain nameless) will still take us even though we are now 20 minutes late. As I approach the service counter, panting from my sprint to the finish line, the young twenty something still has no kids OBVIOUSLY girl working the service counter asks for my name, I can tell she's already got an attitude, she looks me up in the computer and says "well, you've missed your appointment and now we are about to close for lunch"... so I say, "can you still take us or maybe take us right after lunch?" To which she replies, "I'm sorry the next available appointment I have is 7pm this evening, would you like to book that?" To make a long story short, after trying to explain to her that it's not easy to get 2 babies to a photo studio, that I hit unexpected traffic and that there's absolutely no way I can hang around the mall for 7 hours until her next appointment, she tells me, "well maybe you can try again another day"!!!! Needless to say, they will never see me again.

Flash forward about 30 minutes, I'm aimlessly wondering the mall trying to decide whether we should have lunch first or get in the car and go home when I spot an Easter display with an adult size Bunny and some cameras (a la Santa's in the mall) . I approach this oasis, observing my young ones reactions to this giant creature (the Easter bunny) waving at them, they are smiling and seeming to like this creature. There is no one else in line and I'm informed that there are no obligations to buy the pictures so I decide to go for it. First, I take Joshua out of the stroller who goes directly to the bunny and wants to be picked up, so far so good... then I take out Allison (semi-expecting a meltdown) but to my pleasant surprise she too goes directly to the bunny. So quickly, I prop them both up on either side of the bunny and success!!!




To anyone reading this in the Seattle area, this bunny is at Alderwood Mall until Easter!

So now you ask, what about the pear and the epiphany?.... This has nothing to do with the Easter bunny, just all part of a day in my life. My kids have always loved pears (from pureed when they were infants to bite sized cubes as they got older) but recently they want nothing to do with my little cubes of pear. For some reason, yesterday I thought let me try to cut them differently; I used an apple slicer and then split each quarter the slicer produced into 2 long pieces (they kind of looked like homemade fries, not that my kids have ever had fries). Josh and Alli loved it, they ate the whole pear and another one at lunch today. The epiphany was that it's not the pear they don't want anymore, they just got bored with the bite sized cubes. So next time your kids don't want to eat one of their favorites, break out the cookie cutters, make some fun shapes and see what happens!