Remembering Easters past

 You ate the ears off your chocolate
bunny first at Easter 2010!

Happy Easter, Kieran! I hope you are enjoying the day. Today I've included some pictures of past Easters we've spent together.

I remember our first Easter very well. It was in 2007, and we were living in Crescent City, Calif., where I was the newspaper's managing editor. You were just a wee baby of only two months! Still, we got you a  Easter basket that included a baby's book about Peter Cottaintail and a stuffie bunny rabbit.

In 2011, you and I made Easter sugar cookies together! You helped me roll out the dough, stamp the shapes, and frost the cookies! One of the cookies that you really liked was of a baby duck, which we frosted yellow (except for the bill, which we frosted orange) and gave a dollop of black for its eye.

Here's are a whole bunch of pictures from Easter 2010, which was on April 4 that year!

My email to you for March 30, 2013

Your Easter basket, 2012

Here is my email to you sent on March 30, 2012, in case you don’t receive it.

Hi Kieran,

How are you doing? I love and miss you very much. I am not certain why our visit planned for yesterday was cancelled, but I want you to know that I had nothing to do with it. I wanted to spend time with you because you are the most important person in the world to me. You always have been and always will be. Hopefully our cancelled visit soon will be rescheduled.

Tomorrow is Easter, so I thought I would share a few memories I have of the holiday with you.

Our very first Easter was in 2007! You received a small basket with a tiny stuffie bunny rabbit and a little book about Peter Cottontail. We lived in Crescent City, Calif., at the time, and though the weather there usually was rainy, that Easter was nicely sunny. We went out to eat for Easter dinner, and you sat in your child carrier on the table and you slept through the whole meal! A lot of people stopped by to look at you because you were so darn cute!

In 2010, when you were three years old, you didn’t get an Easter basket. You got an Easter bucket! It was a Star Wars sandbox pail that we filled with all kinds of goodies. One of the items was a chocolate bunny rabbit. You ate the bunny rabbit’s ears first!

In 2011, when you were four years old, you and I made Easter sugar cookies together! You helped me roll out the dough, stamp the shapes, and frost the cookies! One of the cookies that you really liked was of a baby duck, which we frosted yellow (except for the bill, which we frosted orange) and gave a dollop of black for its eye. We also went to the Easter Egg hunt at Lancaster, Calif., City Park.

Last year, when you were five years old, we were living in the condo in Palmdale, Calif., and we had spent all day Saturday together. When you woke up Sunday morning, I mentioned that the Easter Bunny had left something for you at the front door! The Easter basket was a good mix of toys, candies and clothes I had picked up for you just the week before on our drive from Wisconsin to California.

After a little breakfast, we went to the Easter Egg hunt and festivities at City Park in Lancaster. At the end of the egg hunt, one child had just a couple of Easter eggs in his basket and was afraid that he wouldn't receive a reward for turning in the eggs (All the children received some candy and a little toy for turning in the eggs.), so all on your own you offered to share some of your eggs with him! I was so very proud of you for being so kind and generous.

I will miss you tomorrow during Easter. I hope you have a good day, though, and that the Easter Beagle brings you everything you wish for! We are next scheduled to get together on April 26, but hopefully we will see one another once before that date as well.

Love,

Dad

Sorry that we won't see each other today

I was looking very forward to seeing you this afternoon, Kieran. I don't think I can express enough to you how much I miss you and long for the times when we are together. You're the kind of a son that every father wants, and I've always been very proud of you.

You need to know that I did not cancel our planned visitation today. You also should know that no reason was given by the visitation center as to why our visitation was canceled, and no offers were made by the canceling party to reschedule it.

*****
Did you know that one year ago today I called you from Wisconsin! I had flown back to the Midwest to move Jane out to California. Jane and I spent the day getting together with people we hadn't seen in a long time, including Grandma and Grandpa Bignell.

They so wanted to see you, and Jane and me had tried to come up with a way to bring you on the trip. But we ultimately decided that it would be awful complicated to do, and the long drive back to California would get boring very quickly for you.

But I did promise Grandma and Grandpa Bignell that I would bring you back to Wisconson on vacation to see them. It's a promise I have yet to fulfil, but it is one I will keep - after all, I also promised you that one day I would bring you to their farm to meet them. And I always keep my promises!

Writings from my past

For the last couple of days, I've been editing a book about a man whose young wife died. He then receives a mysterious letter and a key to a storage shed; the letter says that stuff belonging to his former wife is stored there. He goes to the shed and finds all of her diaries and writings from her childhood. Then he begins to read them and discover things about his wife that he never knew.

I wanted to tell you about this story because I also have many writings from my past stored away and want you to have them should anything happen to me. Grandma and Grandpa Bignell will keep them for you.

Unfortunately (Well, given their lack of quality, maybe not fortunately!), my writings from childhood have been lost over time, but my journal entries largely begin in junior high with some writings from college.

Most of the stories lsot from my childhood were short stories I wrote in fourth through eighth grade. Almost all of them were set in the Star Trek universe or other science fiction pieces.

You always enjoyed creating stories when we were togther. Do you like to write stories, too?

Sharing some pictures with you

Scandinavian Festival, April 17, 2010

The other night your cousin Rebekah was visiting Grandma and Grandpa Bignell the same night that I was, and she wanted to look at pictures of you and all of your adventures. I have many of them online so was able to show her some that I have posted for all of my Facebook friends to see.

Rebekah is the same age as you and also in kindergarten, so she's very interested in the fun that you've had.

We looked at pictures of your trips to Legoland, Disneyland, the beach, and to the Poppy Festival last year in Lancaster. I think she was a little envious of all of the great adventures we've taken together!

Showing her the pictures was fun because I got to recall all of our fun times together and to tell her fun stories about you. She says she can't wait to meet you in person!

Memories of spring breaks past

During the last week or so you've probably been on spring break - that week long vacation from school that usually occurs around Easter.

During elementary school, I didn't have spring break! We usually just got a day or two off of school around Easter, typically Good Friday or the Monday after.

When I was in high school, my school started doing spring break. I kind of liked having the break from homework and classes, but after a couple of days I always missed my friends.

In college, we always had spring break. For me, it was a great chance to catch up (and even get ahead) on schoolwork I had to do. That made the rest of the school year easier and gave me more time to have fun once all of my friends got back to college!

How did/are you spend/ing your spring break?

Remember hiking into a volcano?

Do you know where you were standing four years ago on Monday? You were in the middle of a volcano!

We went on a hike to the Amboy Crater, a famous extinct volcano in the Mojave Desert near the historical Route 66. As you were very young, I took you up into the volcano on my back in a child carrier, and when we got to the middle of the it, I let you out. The picture at above right shows you playing in the cone.

The black rock is called basalt and was lava that flowed out of the cinder cone and hardened. Lava last flowed out of the volcano some 5,000 years ago.

Here's a whole bunch of photos from our hike!