I’m so glad that Easter is finished and gone for another whole year, and as far as I know we don’t have another sugary sweet holiday for a while. Am I right or have I forgotten about something that’s coming up in the next couple of months?

The hardest thing about this Easter, aside from us cutting out dairy and wheat and sugar and well…..everything else was that it was Geli’s 10th Birthday on the Wednesday before. April 4th.

We had her birthday, and she wanted something for school. I brought mini cupcakes, but after thinking about it……I could have and should have done something differently. I’ll explain in a minute.

On Friday she went out with Jon’s mom for dinner and shopping. Then on Saturday we had her Birthday party, and then we normally celebrate Easter on the Monday with an Easter egg hunt and baskets and other fun stuff and chocolates and candy.

After starting to cut out all these foods, it’s hard to have barely started and to have to break the rules a whole bunch of times.

I did bring cupcakes to her school, but regretted it the whole time. After what I did for Easter, I could have gotten just a candy for each kid and wrapped it up with some ribbon or something and given those. I think it would have been better than the dairy/wheat/sugar/dye filled cupcakes even if they were only the mini ones.

We made a butterfly cake for her birthday, and I’ll get the pics up soon. Just too lazy to do it right now. She invited a few kids from her class, and our next door neighbor and a girl from church, and ended up with 3 of them showing up to her bowling party. Same as last year. I know! BORING! I felt bad for her with only 3 kids showing up, but she and they seemed to have a blast said Jon who was there to supervise ’cause I took Xan and J to Zellers to buy them a toy while Geli’s party was on. That was the trade off for them not getting to go, but also, then they didn’t get to eat the cake either, and that I was thrilled about.

We had already talked about how if the kids were really good between when we started this new way of eating and Easter, that I’d get them a candy for Easter. I had big plans of filling their baskets with little toys and treats, and ONE candy, and ended up just getting the one candy ’cause I’m lazy like that.

I had been stressing for a few days about what to do, ’cause I didn’t want to get them chocolates, or anything with “bad stuff” in it. I had been raking my brain to think how I could give them a can of peaches or something equally as exciting and have them throw their arms around me and tell me how amazing I was.

I found a smaller sized egg of Skittles, and a SweetTarts and Nerds. I let the kids choose one. Xan and J chose the nerds, and Geli chose the Skittles. I think that the Nerds were the lesser of the two evils. They had a lot fewer ingredients, and the worst thing was the sugar. No Dairy, No Wheat, No Yeast, just TONS OF SUGAR and DYE!

I figured that I could live with a sugar high, and ride the sugar low right into bed time.

We also decided to do it on Sunday afternoon right after a big roast chicken dinner so that their tummies were full of other food AND so that they had the whole day on Monday to wind down from it all.

I was surprised at how mild the reaction to the sugar was. I think that the child who had the hardest time was Geli and she’s the one who had cheated the most over the last couple of days.

She was having a hard time sleeping, and was brutal with the whole family. She bagged at us like it was going out of style. She fought with both Xan and J for no good reason. She had a headache, and a stomach ache, and just generally felt awful.

The kicker was when she set her alarm clock to midnight so that she could sneak up stairs and steal a few Oreo cookies. (I used them for the body of the butterfly.) We were still up when she crept upstairs, and so she set her alarm clock for 5am on Sunday morning, and then did come up and steal 2. She ratted herself out when she was feeling guilty and sick enough later that night, but seriously………

We kept bringing her back to the fact that the reason she felt so sick and out of sorts was because of what she was putting into her body, and that she had to make the decision that she didn’t want to feel like that anymore. It’s a hard call to make. Monday we hard cored the eating plan, and Tuesday and Today as well. The kids are all back on track, and being their nice, cheery selves….most of the time!

This was the easiest Easter we’ve ever been though and I keep asking Jon how we lucked out to get these amazing kids who with very few exceptions aren’t giving us any problems regarding what is a MAJOR life change. I read a few blogs on Monday and Tuesday that mentioned the candy-crazed state of their children, and I was so glad that we didn’t do that this year. It felt good to be at peace, and to know that regardless of how much candy they got – they were still happy.

We did do a super fun Treasure hunt, that ended up with them finding their 3 eggs, but that was good enough for them. They didn’t say or act like they needed more, and they shared between Geli’s Skittles and Xan and J’s Nerds, so they got a little taste of 2 different candies.

They didn’t whine or complain, not at all. I know I keep mentioning that, but I expected a lot more of what Geli did over the weekend from all of them, a lot more of the time. It’s almost like I’m waiting for the shoe to drop. I don’t want it to, but this just seems TOO easy! I’ll take it! I’m not saying that I want it to be more difficult, but WOW! I’m in shock!

I’m still working on that post about what it is that we do eat. Not that I have it sitting in my Drafts folder, but I’m still thinking about and planning on writing about what it is that we eat. Maybe you can share what it is that you eat, and I can find a few more different ideas to add to my healthy eating menus. If you are able to get a few ideas that you can adapt for your family, then we will be a fun happy little sharing family, won’t we?

OH! And my cousin, Charlene, is potty training her little girl right now. If you have any ideas or tips that really worked for you – could ya head on over and leave her a comment. She’s way far away from the rest of us in Florida, and doesn’t have any family close by. It’s always nice to have some extra support when you’re working through things that require a LOT of extra effort! Love ya Char!