We forgot Easter

This is our kid's second Easter and we forgot it. Again.

We started out with the best intentions - we talked about doing an Easter Egg Hunt in the back garden, we chose a big Easter present for them and we even planned to video tape their happy hunt to send to our family back home.

Yeah, none of that ended up happening.

It started with the need to buy the kids a log cabin windy house for the back garden - and only a log cabin would do. (our plan is to pop a full Canadian flag on it and call it an RCMP post). They're about £350 brand new (screw that!) but go for about £100 used online so it became Paul's mission over the next few days to get this magical log cabin - and thus began his dark obsessive spiral into the murky world of Ebay.

Ebay is fine and good if you're after something trivial, don't really care much and have a crapload of time on your hands. However, this was a log cabin and we needed it, which necessitated Paul entering 12 different bids and obsessively watching, waiting and strategising. He stopped eating. He set alarms throughout the night to check the bids. We mapped out bid locations throughout England, Scotland and Wales in terms of driving distance and gas cost on top of end price. We even factored in how many Burger King stops would be necessary on such road trips, and added the cost of these. We're down to 6 feasible bids.

Two full days we were at this, determined to give our kids the best Easter ever with the surprise of a glorious log cabin. Two full days of obsessively checking Ebay, not straying far from the house in order to maintain bidding position. Two days of googlemapping and cost analysis.

We were outbid on all 12. I don't know who these people are that paid upward of £160 for a log cabin made of cheap, faded plastic that probably smells of cat pee and homeless Eastern Europeans.

Thus our plan to give the girls a brilliant second Easter (and making up for having forgotten their first one) was already on a downhill slope.

Okay, that's fine. Easter isn't about presents. It's about zombies and chocolate, right? Well, we could at least get the chocolate right, and off to Sainsburys we went - coming home with £28 worth of chocolate goodness on Friday, and having eaten every last piece (don't worry, we shared with the kids. A bit. Well, they have small tummies and chocolate isn't very good for them anyway) by Saturday night. And all of the stores are closed until Monday.

Okay, so we failed on the chocolate front. It's a good thing, I guess, because with chocolate this:

Plus this:

Turns into this:

So we kind of dodged a bullet there.

Still, it's Easter, and Easter is all about chocolate ( they're too young still for zombies ) so Paul ran off to the store to buy at lease some Easter chocolate goodness for the kids (Aero bars) and we had the best intentions to wake up early before the kids to hide chocolate bars and a couple of their stuffies throughout the garden for the kids to find.

But it rained. And we slept in. And honestly? The kids couldn't have cared less anyway.

So for the kids' second ever Easter we spent it hanging out, eating omelettes, playing outside, eating Aero bars and having good friends over for a roast and veggies.

So despite our very best intentions, we failed at Easter as parents. But we don't have to tell them, in fact, maybe we can photoshop some nice Easter memories for the kids this year.

Parenting Win after all!