Re-Thinking the Easter Bunny

Okay, okay,  I know Easter is long gone and nobody's thinking about it anymore.  Everyone's focused on Mother's Day, Father's Day, perhaps even Fourth of July or graduation celebrations.  But not here at the Skillman house.  We're still stuck on Easter because the consequences of one little misguided decision is still rearing it's ugly head around here.


This year "The Easter Bunny" adopted what was thought to be a very clever idea.  What it turned out to be was a very very foolish notion.  We decided The Bunny decided to enact a scheme to give out less candy by filling the eggs with pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, a few $1 and $5 bills, and A NEW and VERY MISGUIDED IDEA...some coupons.

It all worked out brilliantly at first.  No sugar highs, no candy wrappers strewn about, or chocolate schmucked onto furniture.  A brilliant plan...until the coupons started getting turned back in!

I must confess it all seemed like a good idea since our kids usually forget about this kind of stuff.  I figured The bunny figured the kids would lose them all in no time and never actually hand the coupons back in.  Sneeky I know.  It's kinda like those big companies that hand out all those rebates knowing most people are going to forget to mail it back on time or betting that they'll lose their original receipt.

Well, that devious plan backfired (as most of my devious plans do).  All was quiet for several weeks.  In fact, I had completely forgotten all about the coupons...until things suddenly took a turn for the worse over the course of a single tragic day:

When Chloe came home from school, I casually asked her to unload the dishwasher.  She handed me this:

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So, while I unloaded the dishwasher all by myself,  I asked Connor to head up to his trashed bedroom and do a little picking up.  To which he responded by handing me this...

Those underhanded little demons did not stop there!  Nooooooo.

Once a week a strange phenomenon happens in which Connor and Chloe begin to get so giggly and silly that they turn into strange imps and get into all kinds of mischief.  Naturally, it happened on this day.  Things quickly unraveled when they started provoking the cat with one of those laser pointers-which sends Edward Scissorhands into an erratic scamper around the house and furniture.  Finally when I couldn't take the "lets freak out the cat" game any longer, I beg them to stop and threaten to send them outside.  That's when they handed me this...in conjunction with this...(double coupons!!)

So now they're out of trouble and I'm upstairs in a very messy/stinky boy's room for the next 20 minutes playing some sort of homemade board game with these two demonized rascals who decided to share coupons!

That 20 minutes was a trial on my patience!   Playing a homemade game for 20 minutes strait with giggly children who knew they were pulling one over on me took some serious effort on my part!  When I had served my prescribed time I immediately got up and headed out of the room.

No sooner had I reached the threshold I was handed this:

Just great.

Operation "Infuriate Mother" was now almost complete.  I was now plotting to hide empty eggs next year full of absolutely nothing!  As I contemplated cruel Easter Bunny tricks for next year, I spent the next half hour reading in the middle of the day to two squirmy kids who knew they had gotten the best of their mother.

When my time was up, yet again, I attempted my getaway.  But not before another coupon:

Luckily for me, when a nine year old requests dinner it's usually for things like mac and cheese or nachos!  So I got through this coupon much easier.  Unfortunately, that meant the rest of us would be insulting our palettes by eating kid food.

At last dinner was over which meant I would soon be starting the bedtime routine!  Whew!  I couldn't wait to end this day.  I was already plotting to "misplace" the rest of their coupons the following day when the kids were at school!

At last the day was done and I could send the scoundrels to bed and close this awful chapter on lessons learned.

But, no, I had not seen the last of the dreaded coupon nightmare!  These two had one more coupon to bestow...

Coupons Schmoopons!  Let their teeth rot next year.