What A Week

Dear Diary,
This week I stuffed toys and candy into little plastic eggs. I was not alone in this. Thankfully I had help. When we ran out of stuffings (but not eggs), the count was around 700. Yep. 700 plastic eggs crammed with stuff. For 28 children to seek, find, collect and tear into. It was mostly fun.
My sister sponsors the family Easter bash every year. Every year she spends a small fortune on toys and candy, gathers a few family members, and spends a weekend stuffing eggs. But this year, she was too busy, so she needed unsupervised egg-stuffers.

Day 1: I carried boxes and bags up from my sister's basement. She had been ordering nifty toys through Oriental Trading Co. and other mail order places -all year long. (gasp) I also helped unpack boxes and organize everything. The collection of goodies covered the 8 person dining table. Then we stuffed eggs.

Day 2: I stuffed eggs with my Mom and another family member. A third adult matched egg halves and laid them out for us. We shared space with a toddler who kept trying to grab candy off the table. I got to experience the Mother Of All Arguments too!
Ok, I know moving Grandma to a facility where she can step up to more advanced care when she needs to is a tender subject amongst the family members, but this argument was just plain ugly. I haven't seen my family fight like that since we were all living in the same house. It freaked me out, and I left. I know other families fight like that sometimes, but not my family.

Day 3: I was entrusted with the key to my sister's house, and went over all by myself to stuff eggs. Chasmyn came over to get some moving boxes and stayed to help. It was so fabulous of her, and totally unexpected. She really made a difference. The three of us filled eggs until we ran out of goodies. All that's left are a bunch of lollipops. Woot! We filled 200 eggs in about 2 hours; the same amount of eggs took 4 hours on fight day. We laughed, told stories and ate Chinese food. There was a great sense of accomplishment when we were done.

Although those 3 days were spaced out through the week, it was exhausting, in it's own way. I have a pattern that I'm used to following, and it was all interrupted this week. This morning, the frustration caught up with me. While washing dishes, I flung a coffee cup too hard into the sink. The cup broke, along with another cup and a china bowl. Dammit!
I broke my nifty spring green cup and the last of my Starry Night knock off cups. I'll never be able to replace that. They were made back in the early '90's, and the whole cup was covered with the swirls and spires that you see in Van Gogh's famous painting, but they weren't actual replicas. It was a knock off pattern, and I was very attached to it.
Oh well, maybe I'll replace it with Van Gogh's other starry night. The one with a canal reflecting starlight as the central theme. I think it's called "Starry Night on Waters" or something like that.