I’m just going to start this off by throwing my hands into the air and admitting that I put way too much pressure on myself for every holiday. No matter how many times I tell myself “no biggie, we’ll just do this and that.” Somehow, SOMEHOW I work myself into a frenzy trying to make everything perfect. But then things aren’t EVER perfectly perfect in every perfect way and I flip out a little and stress and refuse to blog about it.

Yep. I had to talk myself into blogging about it.

So here we go.

The one thing that I was looking forward to when Jeremy and I started house hunting was being able to have Easter in our own backyard. We started looking in January, so I remember hoping that we would be in our own house by Easter of last year. But that didn’t happen. I was a little disappointed, but the house was worth the wait.

And that meant that THIS year was our very first Easter in our new home. I was super excited thinking about it. I planned on teaching the kids how to decorate Easter eggs since we’ve always just done the plastic Easter eggs in the past. Plus we found the kids some cute Easter clothes and baskets. Everything was perfectly coming together.

And then, a few days before Easter, we had this REALLY strong and loud thunderstorm that knocked our fence over. Well, part of the fence. But enough of the fence was laying in the yard that it made me think “can we even still HAVE an Easter here?” I had visions of the kids taking off and running through the gap in the fence or getting splinters from the wood. I DON’T KNOW. But I definitely freaked out about it.

And then Jeremy reassured me that we could still have Easter in our backyard and everything would be OK. Despite the fence clearly being in our way. So we kept our plans. And we decorated some Easter eggs for the first time with the kids.

Which was a ton of fun! That is, until I realized that we used the OLD eggs in the fridge instead of the fresh dozen we had just bought. Yep. And this problem couldn’t be blamed on some freak thunderstorm. This one was all on me. So I was really disappointed in myself and the kids were upset that they couldn’t eat their lovely creations. But they recovered pretty fast once the egg hunting began. Thankfully we also had plastic eggs with candy inside. (And pay no attention to the Happy Birthday banner still hanging in the background from Shade’s birthday party in January! I totally forgot to take that down.)

They never once complained about the fence being in the way of their egg hunt. And they didn’t say anything else about the bad eggs. AND they didn’t complain when we all came down sick two days later. In their minds they had the BEST. EASTER. EVER. So why do I keep beating myself up over the small stuff?

After we started to get over our colds and I could, you know, breathe again. I realized that I could learn a lot from these two small people of mine. Every time I try to get things perfect, it’s so that THEY have a perfect time. And really, it doesn’t take much more than a fun egg hunt and some candy for them to have a perfect time. So I’ve been putting all of this pressure on myself for no reason at all.

Motherhood is funny like that. We put all of our efforts into keeping our kids safe and making sure they have the greatest time possible. But that’s not reality at all. Life is full of disappointments and imperfect Easters. It’s how we teach our kids to react to the disappointments that really matter. In my case, my kids have taught ME how to react. How to stop sweating the small stuff and just eat all the candy. I mean, really.

And I can’t promise that I’ll stop trying to achieve perfect holidays with Jeremy and our kids. That would be a lie. But it’s my goal as a mother to stop beating myself up when things don’t go perfectly. To be flexible with the whole “according to plan” bit. Because one day the kids probably WILL mind when things aren’t perfect. And they need to see a positive attitude from me instead of a negative one.

So despite everything, we really did have a freaking great Easter this year. How about you guys?

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