Poot and Cubby

It is possible my child will never eat eggs again. To celebrate the upcoming Easter, her daycare does what they always do – provide amazing, hands-on fun for the kids. I’m seriously thinking about moving in there once the new kid shows up… Anyway, this week they brought in some eggs from a local farm and put them in an incubator so that the kids could see the chicks emerge. Yesterday, some of the chicks hatched and when I took Elliot to see them she lapsed into a state of utter confusion. Our eggs at home have never done this before! Either these are magical eggs or I’m going to have to be very careful the next time that I help mommy make pancakes.

The egg confusion didn’t end there. One of the workers gave us an egg that Elliot had dyed blue in celebration of the season. She begged Jay and me to allow her to eat it in the car (begged us!) and we told her it was just too messy and she was going to have to wait until we got home. From the frenzy that ensued, I smartly deducted that she probably thought the colorful egg was filled with chocolate. What else was she supposed to assume after eating a Cadbury Crème Egg the day before? So after me saying, “Honey. You know it’s not chocolate, right? It’s an egg. Not chocolate.” She would say, “I gonna eat dat.” This conversation continued (not a conversation, really, more like a repeat-a-thon where we both pretended we were talking to walls) until we got to the house, she whipped off her coat like it was on fire, and yelled at me, “Open it, mommy!” So, while telling her again that it wasn’t chocolate, I cracked the egg and Jay and I waited anxiously for her reaction.

When confronted with the oddly textured white thing that lay beneath the colorful shell, she examined it. And looked up at me accusingly. Clearly, I had forgotten to take off this other layer of wrapping and underneath laid a bounty of chocolaty delights. She stuck her tongue to it tentatively. “That very yucky.” I tried again to clear up the confusion, by slicing the egg in half. “See, honey. It’s an egg. NOT CHOCOLATE.” She took one half in her wee hand and looked for lack of a better word, betrayed. Like I had just delivered a slap across her face for no reason. Like I had just told her that puppies were just a cruel figment of her imagination. Or that her grandma cannot, in fact, walk on water. She reached out with her free hand, touched the yolk, and declared, “Dat not cream!” and collapsed into a shuddering heap of tears. So, clearly she was expecting an egg of the Cadbury variety.

What does it say about the kind of parents that we are that our child assumes all egg-shaped things must be chocolate? More importantly, what does it say about us that when witnessing our kid experience such a devastating, earth-shattering loss, we laughed so hard we wished we were the ones wearing diapers? Sorry we’re such jerks, honey.

**BTW – I’m aware that the title is a bit cheeky and possibly even blasphemous; I’m not religious in the least, so for me Easter really is all about the chicks, the chocolate eggs (and the freak bunnies who somehow manage to lay them), but most of you probably already knew that…