No Easter Bunny can ruin that.

One of the best parts of parenthood for me is that it's been absolutely therapeutic in understanding and working through my own childhood. I've saved thousands that would have gone to therapy if I hadn't had H when I did, ha.

I also have spent thousands on my kids and they're a 24/7 job that allows no sick days...so perhaps therapy may have been the easier route. But I digress...

This evening I tucked those sweet loves into bed after reading a chapter of The Magician's Nephew (I purchased a complete boxed set in Oxford some 7 years ago and am only just now beginning to read The Chronicles of Narnia. Go figure). After I scratched their heads until they were asleep I slipped out from between them in the bed and walked downstairs where J was installing a cabinet in our laundry room.

Total tangent here, but going to Menards and buying a cabinet all by myself and bringing it home and saying "here, we have a cabinet for the laundry room. It's done," made me feel more grown up than getting married or becoming a mother. I have no doubt I'll psychoanalyze the reasoning behind that some day.

Anyway, I grabbed a grocery sack full of Easter eggs and took them outside, scattering them all over our backyard so the kids would wake up and fine a colorful yard (no worries, there isn't any candy in the them - just legos and mini animal figurines) full of magical eggs.

Then I stuffed their Easter baskets full of books, bubbles, ninja turtle toothbrushes, legos, sunscreen and sunglasses and hid them separately in the family room. My first thought when I was doing this was how I'd tell the kids in the morning, "Oh, that Easter Bunny is such a trickster, he must have hid them!"

And it stopped me in my tracks.

I've always let my children believe what they want about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the likes, all the while also being sure they heard the truth and never playing into the fabricated stories of such characters, but also trying not to make it completely un-magical for them either. It's a really tricky slope to be on.

There are so many reasons for this, one of the big ones for me always being that I wouldn't lie to my kids. In any way.

I've changed so much in the past five years as a human being. And as a mom. Mostly in really, really good ways. I've grown a lot.

It dawned on me that a little Ki never felt safe and secure. She never felt confident that others were being honest with her. She trusted no one; most especially adults.

I didn't want that for my kids. I didn't want to ever be a person that even for a single solitary second my kids' doubted or distrusted.

But I've finally realized that "playing" Easter Bunny won't make them lose trust in me or cause them to feel unsafe. They know it's pretend just as well as I do. So it doesn't mean I can't play along if it makes them happy.

They have strong voices and strong opinions. They are so confident and secure in themselves I'm sometimes taken aback because it's a kind of certainty in oneself that most adults have never acquired, so to witness it in two such tiny human beings is in some ways terrifying, and in other ways exhilarating.

I know that by waking up in the morning and kissing the tops of their crazy bedhead and telling them that trickster bunny has been here won't devastate their worlds. It won't cause them to suddenly believe that people aren't worth trusting or believing in. Because it takes so much more than just the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus to do that. It takes a lot of things that they will never be privy to in their childhoods because they're different people.

They're not me. They have and will continue to have different experiences and relationships. And I am so thankful for that. They have parts of me for sure. And my heart swells when H staples another "book" she's created and hands it to me, or spouts off one of her many know-it-all facts, because I know that comes from me. And when B hugs me so tightly, and keeps holding on long after most people would have let go, or when tells me he's been around too many people and wants to chill out by himself, I know that comes from me too.

They get a lot from me. And so much from J. But even more from themselves. And no Easter Bunny can ruin that.