This was Easter weekend, and we had occasion to reflect that even though we are raising our children without any religion so far, we have not found suitable substitutes for family traditions to anchor our lives around the calendar. We "celebrate" things like Christmas and Easter, mainly with Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, but Sava has no idea that these holidays are primarily religious; in fact, he doesn't know what religion is. Though I am a bit too tired to think about it right now, I am determined not to let another year pass before we figure out how we explain these holidays to our children and what rituals we create for ourselves that will give them a moral and ethical grounding in the world. The earth, nature, and friends should be a good place to start.
We marked Easter with lunch Saturday at the house of our friends, the Saarnios, whose two youngest daughters come for regular playdates every week in our house, while the third one goes to kindergarten. They had set up a terrific egg hunt in their steep front yard, and Sava participated along with about a dozen other kids. The hosts had outdone themselves, putting over 200 eggs all over the yard, so it was no wonder that Sava--who realized quickly that the race goes to the swiftest and focused on gathering eggs as though his life depended on it--ended up with about thirty of them.
Then Easter Sunday, it was finally time to go pick Sava's much anticipated birthday present, aka Big Boy Bike. We had intended to buy a 16"-wheeler, but Sava felt it was too big and "too wobbly" for him, so we ended up with a much less "big" 12" Schwinn Tiger, which he later took for an afternoon ride in the rain around the neighborhood
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