This morning I escaped for an hour to ensure that the Easter bunny would be bringing enough jellybeans and chocolate bunnies to keep AJ bouncing off the walls all day Sunday and well into next week. AJ also helped me count out eggs into a pot of water to hard boil in preparation for tomorrow�s dying extravaganza. Last year AJ wasn�t really interested in egg dying, although he loved the end product. He was, however, thoroughly disappointed that the eggs weren�t the same color inside as outside. Inside a bright blue shell, an egg is just an egg. Moreover, once peeled, it will probably be suggested that he actually eat the egg, an activity that on the AJ scale rates somewhere between having his toenails cut and wearing mittens.

While there are certain culinary aspects to the Easter holiday that are not in AJ�s favor, he can rest assured that he will be awash in assorted high sugar treats, which should more than make up for eggs and leg of lamb.

I�ve always thought the tradition of eating lamb for Easter to be odd. My problem with lamb dates back to one Easter when I was about 6 or 7 where we spent the holiday with my dad�s family, who are all devout Lutherans of the German-American variety. Easter is a very big deal for them and includes a lot of food, most of which seemed to have been cooked in lard for a very long time. Early Easter morning, my grandfather, who was a rather stern and forbidding person who had the completely fascinating skill of being able to take out his teeth and put them on the table, woke up my brother and I and sent us out to the curb to get his morning paper. At 6 a.m. It was still dark. My brother and I stumbled into our clothes and did as we were told and discovered sitting on the stoop next to the paper two large margarine tubs with Easter grass protruding from the edge of the plastic lids. We weren�t quite sure what to do. Since it wasn�t our house, we assumed the Easter bunny had intended to surprise our grandparents with gifts of margarine, and so we left the tubs on the stoop and came in with the paper. My grandfather looked stern when we came in and dutifully handed over the paper. �Are you sure there wasn�t anything else out there?� He peered at us over the edge of his glasses. We looked at each other, mute. Finally, my grandfather gave up, �Oh for Pete�s sake, I�m sure the Easter bunny left something out there for you. Why don�t you look again.

Inside the margarine tubs were piles of jellybeans and chocolate eggs, to be carefully counted out then squirreled away in corners of our luggage where our parents would not discover them and take them away to dole out in reasonable portions after meals. My grandfather was pleased and disappeared behind his newspaper with his morning pipe.

The rest of us were gussied up for church at some incredibly early hour. The service was interminable, but finally we ended up at the home of a great aunt for lots of cheek pinching and heavy food that made all the women fan themselves and all the men snore. Somehow in my head, the incessant mention of �lamb of God� during that church service � I hadn�t been to church too many times at that point in my life � became completely intertwined with the Roast Leg of Lamb served on my great aunt�s dining room table. Was this the leg of the Lamb of God? God�s leg? Are we sure it�s a good idea to be eating it? Fortunately, having consumed enough Easter candy, I had a reasonable excuse for avoiding the question altogether and skipped out the back door with my cousins to look for bottlecaps in the alley behind the house. And thus began my earliest foray into vegetarianism.

I�ll be avoiding the lamb, the ham and whatever other carnivorous items that might appear on Sunday too. We�ll be dining at my brother-in-law�s, where AJ�s cousins will keep him entertained. AJ�s also planning a foosball tournament with his uncle. And of course there�s the annual egg hunt, always a crowd pleaser. Last year AJ won the egg hunt by surreptitiously stealing eggs out of everyone else�s baskets and placing them in his own. We�re hoping for more sportsmanlike conduct this year. Unless, of course, the eggs are chocolate. Then all bets are off.

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