In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it...

...you'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade. I'll be all in clover and when they look you over...Sorry - I digress.

These days, holidays seem to take over. No longer is Christmas or Easter just a day; instead, there is a ton of lead-up to it. This week, Mallory went on two egg hunts, and Liam went on one but that was supplemented by treat bags from both his teacher and his after school program. They also got treat bags from Cindy, and have been making Easter crafts with her for a couple of weeks (bonnets included). Today there is an Easter Egg Festival in town, one we have been to before (remember when I was trying to induce labour three years ago??), but we're going to skip it for no other reason than that it's just overkill. We will probably colour our eggs today, and tomorrow we'll probably do our baking for Sunday, and then on Sunday we have a family get-together to attend. It's all quite a lot. Usually at our house, the Bunny leaves one big treat in baskets (or buckets, as the case may be) and then the smaller things are hidden around the house in eggs, and Liam has to find the blue ones and Mallory has to find the pink. I am half-reconsidering the need for them to embark on this hunt. (Who am I kidding - of course we will do it. I'm not about to let everyone else have all the fun!)

Between all of this and Chad's upcoming birthday cake, it's time for a sugar overload, the likes of which have not been seen since Halloween. Lately, there's been a ton of talk about High Fructose Corn Syrup in the news - between the controversial recent new studies, Jamie Oliver's new show and a ton of bandwagon-jumping on a message board I frequent - it's been a barrage. I have to say, this is one good thing about living in Canada. While HFCS is in everything from ketchup to salad dressing in the US, the Canadian equivalent (glucose-fructose) is not. I have been checking labels in the pantry lately, and we have very few products in there with this ingredient. Well... we did have very few... make that the past tense. I thought we were doing well in this regard, but pretty much every bag of Easter candy I've brought home has had it. Not the chocolate, but all manner of jelly beans and jubes. We'll get our fill this weekend and then hopefully phase it out again.

Time to sign off and get my fill of the chocolate Reese eggs before they are gone. I don't know if it's just the proportion of chocolate to peanut butter that's different, and ultimately divine, but these are by far the best product that Reese makes - the best of the best - and they're about to disappear for another 9 months. Time to stockpile.