The tale of the slightly tipsy Easter Bunny.

By BERN MORLEY

Two of my children still believe in Santa, however after what happened last Easter, I’m pretty sure at least one of them is now suss on the Easter Bunny.

See we decided, in our wisdom, to go out on Easter Eve. Fact: Dinner + wine + show + wine + late night = a less than adequate Easter Bunny impersonation. That formula can also lead to irreversibly damaging your twelve year old daughter, who, although old enough to know that the whole Easter Bunny thing is a giant sham, is not entirely prepared to witness her less than sober parents trying to perfect an Easter Bunny sized bite from a questionable carrot.

We’ve got years to save for the therapy. I digress.

So, after successfully making it appear that a Bunny had gone on some kind of rampage through our kitchen, we continued on with the actual Easter Egg Drop. I guess every parent has their own way of doing this, but we’ve always placed the eggs at the end of our children’s bed. This way, when they wake up in the morning, they think that the Easter Bunny was RIGHT.. THERE. RIGHT…FREAKING… THERE! Actually, thinking about it, that’s kinda creepy.

ANYWAY.

My husband walked in first, arms loaded and as it turns out, a little unsteady. See, one of Jack’s eggs was a giant football and I can confirm that when one of these is accidentally dropped on the floor in the dead of night, it makes a loud noise. A noise loud enough to wake up a 5 year old. The situation went a little something like this – Or a little exactly like this:

Phil drops egg, thump, we both freeze mid egg drop like we are playing an epic game of statues and the five year old sits up, looks directly at his father and smiles. Oh shit, it’s all over. No, wait, he lies back down and appears to go back to sleep. We both look at each other, silently place the remainder of the eggs around and then go to bed and pass out.

6 hours later, we are woken by two very excited boys invading our bed. This was too early of course to determine the level of our hangovers, i.e. was it mild and able to be fixed by two Panadol and a Bacon and Egg McMuffin, or more serious and in need of 7 more hours sleep and a long stint sitting on the shower floor.

That’s the thing about kids though, they are fairly indifferent to your self-inflicted suffering.  And rightly so.

After showing off his haul, Jack looked at his father and said “I saw you in our room last night.”  Phil and I made eye contact and simultaneously started to try and explain the situation with horrible and clearly ill prepared lies.

“Well, the Easter Bunny was running a bit late, so he got me to bring the eggs up to your room.”  Sam looked skeptical, yet fairly disinterested.  Jack, with an amazed look, “So you SPOKE to the Easter Bunny?” I piped up with a “Oh sure, we both did, but he had a tonne of eggs to deliver and he was already running behind schedule.” Sam still looked on, saying nothing. Jack just kept looking at us, wide eyed and asked us what we talked about. For some reason, we both continued to further dig ourselves into a complicated and quite frankly, unnecessary hole by spinning a story about broken down cars and having to wait for the RACV.

As we both continued to make up the completely unbelievable tale, Sam got up off the bed, walked over to the door, turned to us slowly and said “Sounds to me like the Easter bunny had one too many beers.” And with that, he sauntered downstairs to check out the carrot situation.

I’m still not sure if he’s on to us.

Bern is a Gen X, child of the 80′s. Kept busy being a working mother of 3 children, one with Aspergers, renovating the original money pit and drinking too many coffees in the space of 24 hours. One day she’ll remember to leave the meat out for tea but until then she writes beautiful and amusing posts on her blog which you can find here. You can also follow her on Twitter here.

How do you tackle the Easter Eve Egg drop? What did you do to make your kids suss on the whether Easter Bunny/Santa was real?