Yesterday was Easter Sunday. The weather was gorgeous! Evelyn had been excited to visit all of her cousins for the last week. I was excited to see family and catch up with them. I posted this super cute photo of my family in our Easter wear. I grabbed some pictures of the Easter cake I made for dinner that night with my in-laws, and we grabbed a couple of pictures of the girls wearing the sunglasses the Easter bunny brought them.
By all accounts, it looks like we had a great Easter holiday. And really, we did. We had a nice day. However, the picture above is completely misleading.
Evelyn was sick. She tested negative for the other thing, it is just a really nasty cold. But it was enough that we had to cancel all of our plans for the day. We stayed home and she rested and allowed her body to fight this virus.
She was pretty tired, although she mustered a little bit of energy to be excited about her Easter basket from the Easter bunny and a quick mini egg hunt we threw together for her. However, after that, she went back to sitting under a blankie on the couch. Poor kiddo.
I have two pounds of bacon in my fridge that I was supposed to bring to the brunch at my mom’s house. I have desserts for 8 people for the dinner at my in-laws house Easter night. I have a bunch of Easter baskets for friends and cousins that didn’t get delivered and are still in my laundry room.
The reason I am telling you all this is to remind you that Instagram and social media is just a highlight reel. It is almost never an accurate depiction of someone’s life entirely. I am very guarded with my girls’ privacy. I ONLY ever intend to post the highlights because I am personally not comfortable with posting anything else that might follow them around forever on the internet. So I just post the good. However, I hate to think I’m part of this narrative that I have everything together. That my girls are always perfect angels or that we never have hiccups or bad days. We do. Occasionally, I even feel like that is all we have. We have meltdowns, we have medical issues, I have days where nothing seems to go right. That is all rarely seen on social media but it is there.
The pressure on mums, specifically, on social media during holidays is intense. We want these perfectly curated Easter baskets, with the beautiful put-together charcuterie boards, and don’t forget the boomerang of the mimosa toast at brunch. I am 1000% guilty of all of those. I don’t know that there is anything wrong with all of that either. Why not aim for a great holiday? However, sometimes…it just isn’t meant to be and we should be okay with that too.
Evelyn wanted to wear her Easter dress and I originally thought no. Why risk getting a brand new dress dirty if we were just going to stay home right? Then I decided to go ahead and let her wear it. So we pulled of the tags, and then quickly grab a few family pictures. I’m glad we did that. Otherwise we wouldn’t have this gem of a picture of both girls.
So again, I hope you always remember that social media is the highlight reel. It’s not at all representative of the reality. These pictures were all taken within a span of 10 minutes and then we all put back on our loungewear and had a quiet day.
It was still a wonderful day with my family, even though it was different from how I thought the day was going to go. But wonderful all the same and we felt blessed.
