Running The Gauntlet

Living remote is great for keeping the kids away from the enormous mountains of chocolate Easter eggs and Easter rabbits at our local supermarket. We shop once every two weeks due to the distance and that is usually when two of our girls are at school anyway. I went to the supermarket last Thursday and as soon as the two glass sliding doors opened, I ran the gauntlet of Easter with Ruby (3yrs) - every coloured Easter egg you could imagine in every shape and size possible, it is quite unbelievable - they have been selling Easter buns since mid January! Even though you have to go through Easter hell to get into the supermarket - there is no way to get in the store avoiding Easter eggs, we have the shops covered, they are not so hard to deal with. Jade and Amber are old enough to remember having Easter in previous years, but Ruby is too young to remember, so taking her shopping at this time of the year is not so bad, she is not as interested in all the colourful Easter chocolates as what the other two girls are.

Now, it is just school Easter activities we have to try to avoid. Last Thursday, Jade came home with a note in her bag from one of the teachers at school asking for the children to bring in a toy rabbit if they own one. Apparently they were going to be measuring the rabbits as part of a special Easter maths activity. The girls didn't take rabbits, I wasn't really very happy about maths being turned into an Easter activity. Unfortunatly there is not much we can do about it without making the girls feel left out, out of the entire school of 200 children, there are 2 Jewish kids - every other child in the school would be celebrating Easter so it is hardly fair to expect them to not have Easter activities for the rest of the school because my girls celebrate Passover not Easter!

It turned out that it wasn't just maths that had been turned into an Easter activity, but the entire day! They had an Easter activity DAY! Yep, the entire day dedicated to easter bunnies, eggs and anything else I have been desperatly trying to avoid. I know the girls would have felt very left out if they had not participated in the activities, but the school is very well aware of our beliefs considering the trouble we had to go to to get the girls out of weekly Christian scripture classes. I don't expect special treatment, nor do I expect them to stop what they are doing because of us, but it would have been nice if they had of brought to our attention that they were planning on dedicating an entire day to Easter activities - I would have preferred the girls to stay home from school that day.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. We live in a tiny town of 300 people, the town basically has no shops and consists of a peterol station, a pub, a post office... and 3 churches!!! 3 churches! What do we need 3 churches for in a town of 300 people? Below are some photos which I took last week of some of the friendly locals in the next town from ours....ah, yes, it is nice to fit in.




.... Just another day ....