Seriously, though, stop snowing or so help me.

It snowed again on Wednesday

and I am just so. done. A month ago I'd have suited Eleanor up to go play in the park because it was only minus a few degrees, but I just. I cannot. We had the car for the morning so we went to the Fun Factory, which was mostly great

and hilarious

except for the part where Eleanor got slapped in the face on three separate occasions by a little boy not much older than her. By the third time I was like, I don't even know what to do with this (besides hand him a piece of his ass because his mom was nowhere to be seen and kid needed a scolding), but the mom of the girl we were playing with went and found his mom and she took him home. Eleanor had to debrief the situation several dozen times that day over playdough.

What that boy did?

And then what mommy said?

And then what that boy's mommy said?

Because she has no siblings yet, so nobody slaps her ever, and she had to figure the situation out. Now she has to clarify, when we're at toddler gym or the play place at the mall, That boy won't slap me in the face.

Who could slap that face, I ask you.

It blustered on Thursday, and then snowed hard(ish) all day Friday.  Joel was post-call and home all day and we kept looking out the window going, Still coming down, hey? Look at it go. Between the weather and this pregnancy I am seriously losing my damn mind, so we went to the mall. Mostly because I wanted to go to Target, but then hey, impromptu petting zoo.

And face painting.

We had the world's worst face painter. Eleanor is supposed to be a fish. I think she knew she'd gotten swindled because at the end she was like, And I would also like two bumblebees. So she was a fish with a bumblebee in each cul-de-sac.

The Easter Bunny was making an appearance that afternoon, so we came back after a nap to wait in line for 45 minutes. The mom in front of us was like, The things we do for our toddlers, and they don't even care, we're just doing it for the cute picture. And I was like, Oh, Eleanor cares.

Is that really you, Easter Bunny? Never let me go.

She was talking to him for a while and when she got down, I asked her what she'd been telling him. I told him to jump and boing, she says, but he is just a sitting bunny. For sitting.

Joel was on call again today, but we had Eastery things to do. We made paska, which you have to start literally first thing in the morning.

And then we combined the egg-dyeing kits from both of Eleanor's grandmas into one SuperKit. First you dye them,

then you look at them smugly,

then you dab at them with ink and sponges (you can't hear her, but she's saying 'dab dab dab' because Eleanor cannot do a thing without also narrating that thing),

THEN you take a break to add flour and things to your paska sponge (and also your counter),

then you add stickers to your eggs,

and when Eleanor 'does some stickering' she likes to do it vertically

and I'm always like, Put some more stickers in the empty space, Eleanor, but today I'm listening to her while she's putting stickers upon stickers and she's all, I need a bumblebee for this flower,

and this bunny need a carrot, and THIS bunny need a carrot

so that put me in MY place. Anyway, after the stickers you're kind of out of things to do with your eggs besides look at them

and pout over the broken one

and then eat them.

Eleanor doesn't get to jazzed about eggs, generally, but she insisted we each eat two of these. While she napped, I 'hid' her eggs (not the decorated ones, plastic ones. For hiding. Try to keep up) around the living room

but not out of sight, because she's two.

I kind of want to throw her an Easter Egg Hunt every day.

Only three of the eggs had chocolate, and the rest just little gewgaws, like this bracelet from a kinder egg my mom sent ages ago. Eleanor called it 'a TIME bracelet,' by which she meant a watch, and once she put it on she kept hollering 'TIIIIIIME! TIIIIIIIIIME!' at it.

By then, our paska dough was ready to be rolled and baked, and while I was making beautiful smooth buns, Eleanor made these craggy messes that turned out MUCH MORE DELICIOUSLY for purposes of icing catchery.

Next year she rolls all the balls. She's already my Designated Sprinkler.

I won't tell you whether we just had paska for dinner

but yes, we did.

And then the sun came out, after a long, overcast day, so even though it was bedtime we put on our rainsuit over our jammies and went to do some stomping.