hop goes the bunny easter

easter bunny hopped through tanay, rizal yesterday and dropped goodies for the kids. nah. it was just my cousin chinky, who played santa by funding this year's easter egg hunt.

hiding all those sixty-four eggs is a blast but still pretty difficult. we don't want the kids to find them too easily, but we also don't want to spoil the fun by putting the eggs in places where you can see them ten yards away.

i love spending easter with family. i always look forward to easter, more than i look forward to christmas. yes, there's the exchanging of gifts part, but every christmas to me is just the same: we spend it in project four, watch tv, eat, sleep... then the next day it's not christmas anymore.

i love easter simply because it's the day after all the fasting, sacrifice, and loooong prayers asking the Lord for forgiveness. it's the long wait, and finally Christ has resurrected.

i'm not too religious. if you ask me, i don't adhere to that many catholic dogmas.

easter for me is a time for rejoicing, for family, for having fun, for the celebrations. during the christmas season, i get to go to so many christmas parties before the actual christmas celebration that i get pooped up by the time christmas comes.

easter is also my time of connecting with my inner self, of cleansing myself of past hurts, of forgiving myself for past mistakes. it's the end of my academic year, so it's my time to evaluate myself after one long year of hard school work. and when i don't have anywhere to go to, it's also my time of physical cleansing. yep, i do my spring cleaning during the holy week. nothing gets better than actually seeing my desk again (after one whole year of being under the mounds of books, papers, bags, and nonsense stuff).

okay, i've sidetracked long enough. we went to tanay, rizal, to the rest house of my cousin jp's in-laws (ang haba ng connection hehe). looked and felt like the usual family cookout: barbecue, lotsa good food, drinks (by that i mean beer), swimming, and the chitchats.

and any family gathering wouldn't be complete without having a baby in center stage: cousin jp's son inggo. haha. before, the baby used to be my tita jing's baby judd, but they're now in canada. before him, my tita michelle's son david, and before him again was cousin john's daughter anezka. i don't know what it is about family gatherings, but our family seems to have at least one pretty baby every year... and we welcome a new one when that baby turns three or four years old. who's will it be in the next years? i wonder.

my sibs joanne and jj and cousin chinky turned the small kubo into a casino (yep, cards, bets by piso-piso, tong-its, beer, and a few smokes), while i played around in the pool with the kids. i was forced into exercise, what with everyone asking me, "ate mariel pull me here," or "ate mariel take me there." haha. i enjoyed it anyway. i also needed to sweat out the few pounds i gained through eating so much during the holy week.

i missed those days when i was the one who looked for easter eggs, but it was actually more fun hiding the eggs and watching the kids search for those eggs. at the end of the day, however, the kids thought of hiding the eggs for us and we would look for them. haha. i didn't join in, but i think the kids had more fun thinking up of places where we would have a difficulty searching.

it's back to research work for me on monday. nope, i want to take a break on monday. i'll read up my articles on monday, edit them on tuesday, and hopefully have a draft of data that still needs to be collected on wednesday. by wednesday, though, i need to get my butt back to UP.

ooh. and while i'm on a break, i'm planning our laiya excursion. hehe. i've just got back from a really long break and now i'm already thinking of another one.

lah-eeh-yah. eeh-lah-yah. yah-eeh-lah. yah-lah-eeh...

i'm going to sleep before i get crazy with syllabic anagrams. happy easter everybody!