Here Comes Peter Cottontail.....

As a child, I received many live gifts for Easter.

No matter how much my mother pleaded, pouted, demanded, etc., her father got me live animals.

Always there were the colored chicks. Cute!

When I was three, my mother relates she was in the kitchen and I got "too quiet". All mothers know exactly what this means.

She found me sitting on the couch with a baby chick in my fist, it's head to the side, neck broken. She said that before she thought, she cried out: "Oh, you killed it!"

I looked up tearfully and said, "I was just loving on it."

Anyway, the chicks that survived turned into bad-ugly adolescents whose feathers gradually turned white with color just on the tips, like an old lady who needs to go to the hair dresser, posthaste.

At that point they would mysteriously disappear.

Then there was the year that with along with the chicks I got a baby duck. My mother named it "Waddles". Apparently I was too little to do the name thing yet. But I do remember the duck. And it grew quickly from a fuzzy yellow ball into a giant white quacking/squirting poop machine.

At that point, he mysteriously disappeared.

I fondly remember the year that, along with all the colored chicks, I got a baby rabbit. My mother named it "Troubles". (Can you see it coming?)

Wasn't long before this "I chew everything in my path to smithereens" became a bigger "I chew everything in my path to smithereens."

At this point -  you guessed it - he mysteriously disappeared.

Good thing I didn't get our cat, Blackie, for Easter. He wouldn't have stuck around for long!

I asked my mother, years later, where did all those animals go? After she blew off steam about my granddaddy not listening to her and giving me living things every year, she said they went to my great-uncle Sam's farm.

Sounds reasonable.

To give my mother credit, she has never given any of her grandchildren live animals, for any reason.

But she has spoiled them and done what she pleased about how to treat them, give gifts to them, and what to let them get away with. As in just about everything.

It's sort of a grandparent clause that says you don't have to be a responsible adult anymore.

It's got me to thinking.

Someday, I hope I'll be a grandparent (but not too soon!). Because I am already plotting on how to be an irresponsible, smug, behind-the-parent's-back kind of person.

I can't wait!

Happy Easter!