The speeding up of life has been well documented, but it continues to take me by surprise. Each annual event that comes along, Jay says “I can’t believe it’s time for that already, it seems like it was just a few months ago.”

Somewhere in a pile on my desk is the Haggadah Jay’s dad created many years ago and mimeographed. We’ve long meant to make some additional copies as well as add a little bit of kid-friendly stuff we’ve found from other sources. It’s unlikely I will even find this before our (already late) Seder tomorrow, and certain the changes won’t be made.

We also seem to be not having our annual Easter Egg coloring party. This is a shock, and might even qualify as a mini-tragedy.

My favorite events of the year are the kid crafts: pumpkins for Halloween, cookies for Christmas, eggs for spring. In the years before kids, I’d get friends together and make them dye eggs, and it was always fun. With acutal kids to do kid projects with, and then their school friends, the party got big. I think last year I hard boiled 12 dozen eggs, maybe more, and still we didn’t invite everyone we wished to. Even with smallish class sizes, the numbers add up quickly.

But that’s not the reason. There really isn’t a reason, there was no decision made. Yet since Easter is Sunday and the party is usually the Saturday before, and I’ve invited no one (and unsurprisingly gotten no rsvps), the chances of anything happening are slim. (There are also the piles of laundry which might prevent anyone from even entering the house.)

I’m trying to accept this as a temporary setback, a one-time slacking that’s, given all that’s been going on, deserved. I’m hoping to claim this as a breather. But it only periodically feels that way.

I managed my whole childhood dying eggs with just my parents, and I wasn’t too badly malformed. I suspect the kids will be fine, and I’ve no doubt the Easter Bunny will come hide the eggs we dye early Sunday morning. And there’s passover (a dinner seder and a fun act-it-out seder we’re invited to). And we visited Harry Potter World at Universal Studios last week, for heaven’s sake.

Still. I wish I had an easy trick for forgiving myself when it just doesn’t come together. I guess that’s the spring magic I get to practice this week.