With this being Easter weekend, I took a walk down memory lane.  The earliest Easter I can remember, I was very sick.  The memory feels surreal, I was laying on a hard couch or loveseat in a room in our house where no one else was.  I remember hearing lots of noise and conversations...with 8 people in the house, it was never quiet.  I was very young and most likely in Kentucky or Tennessee.  I don't remember how I got there, I just remember waking up to a very weird smell and a crinkling sound coming from my chest.  Mama was checking a mustard plaster or something that she had spread on my chest and I think it was wax paper that she had covering it.  I must've had a high fever, the memory almost seems like a hallucination.  I think I dozed off again.  Then the next memory, I'm not sure if it's the same day or the next but it seems like it was AFTER Easter and I was taken outside to our barbeque grill.  When someone opened it, there was a Barbie doll in there for me.  The feeling I get from this memory is very strange, I'm thinking it was because I was so sick.  Mama had told me that once, when I was very young, I dehydrated and almost had to go to the hospital.  I wonder if this is that time.

When our kids were young, we didn't get them the traditional Easter baskets, we always got them a toy of some kind and had the candy in or around the toy.  I remember we had found these bats called Mondo bats that were plastic and shaped almost like a big funnel.  They would hit the ball with it and it made a loud, funny noise.  We had put the candy and little toys inside the bats and had them on the couch Sunday morning for the boys to find and play with.

We had big family gatherings with an Easter egg hunt at Pop and Granny's house.  All the nieces and nephews and Tyler and Wes had baskets that Granny always had for them and the adults would go hide the eggs and then open the front door and let them loose!  It was crazy, loud and hysterical funny to watch! 

Then when ours got older, they and their cousins were the ones that would hide the eggs as the younger cousins went out to find them.  

This year is going to be quiet, for the first time in years we aren't going to the family gathering and neither of our sons will be around so it will be just the 2 of us.  

So far....being empty-nesters isn't all it was cracked up to be.

Musings from a modern day Mamaw