Easter. Shit.

So it's Easter. With so much political correctness, religious views, teacher bashing and Easter Bunnies v Easter Bilbies, I decided that for the first time ever, I just wasn't going there with my kids. Usually I do the whole deal, egg hunt in the class room (cause let's face it, it's all about the chocolate), the Easter basket etc etc. Out of respect to the one child in my room that is Muslim, and the fear that "this chocolate has been sitting in a box in a warehouse that 25 years ago was a soil processing plant that may have contained peanuts" might kill one of my kids, I made an educated decision to not even acknowledge the reason my lemmings and I were not going to see each other for the next 4 days.

Everything was going great guns, none of my kids bought me an Easter present - which, rumour has it, is what teachers at all other schools in the universe get from every child every year; personally I think it's an urban legend - and as such I was confident that my plan was going to come off without a hitch.

We were halfway through a maths lesson on length, when my arch nemesis - a six year old girl, cute as hell even though she looks like a boy cause her mum shaved her head, and an eye roller from the womb - asked "When we make da Easter basket Miss?". To which they all cheered at such an intelligent and amazing stroke of genius, followed by a brief yet powerful wave of shame that they hadn't thought of it earlier themselves.

I was like a deer caught in headlights (cept we don't have deer, so a kangaroo perhaps?), had a momentary freak out, and then played it so cool and told them that *scoff* "Of course we're making Easter baskets! What kind of a teacher do you think I am?" I then spent the lunch break scurrying madly trying to find templates and glitter and glue and pom poms.

My poor little bastards. We had an assembly sprung on us at the last minute, our moron deputy principal took forever talking shit about shit and by the time we got back to our rooms we had about 40 minutes, to colour, cut, glue and decorate the baskets. When the bell rang at the end of the day and all my lemmings filed out with the rest of the school, their little baskets looked so sad, what with their handles missing, rabbit ears chopped off , sticky tape trailing after them and no eggs to put in them.

These kids have enough disappointment in their lives and I'm sad that I just gave them one more thing to be disappointed about. Except I think they were too grateful to have lopsided, half arsed, sticky tape overloaded, empty baskets to even be disappointed. Poor bastards.