The Bow Belle

Easter snuck up on me! I hate it when Easter comes early!  When it comes early it can often mean rain, cold weather, even snow.  When I was very, very little that meant either no Easter egg hunt at all or one inside.  Not that that wasn't fun, of course!  I distinctly remember Easter of 1994, which fell on April third and was wet and rainy.  I was already a tornado buff at the time and found it fitting that April third would be stormy , but I digress.  Mama and Daddy had hidden the plastic Easter eggs in the living room for my sister and me to find, and oh, what fun we had hiding and rehiding those eggs.  And of course there was the candy and toys in our baskets to make us good and hyper, and The Tale of the Bunny Picnic was on one of the kids' channels so there was that to enjoy.  LOL, I still like that opening song! As I grew older my family started going to church again, and Easter consisted of wearing a new outfit if the weather was nice enuf...

LOL, family joke!  The roots of that joke actually began shortly before Christmas one year, as Mama was preparing to put out the decorations.  She named them off as she handed them to me, and as she handed me a spring-themed trio of items she muttered "...and Easter, and Easter, and spring."  Being a fairly young child, I remember thinking "Spring's too far away to look forward to."  And then in the blink of an eye it would be here, kinda like it was this year.  Anywho, the "Easter and Easter and spring" attitude fits my bow today, as it's more of a spring bow than one specifically for Easter.  Come to think of it, the butterfly bow was more for all of spring too. This is NOT a JoJo bow, by the way; my Wal-Mart has a few knock-offs that are just as good as the brand-name bows, and because I've never been a brand snob I get the knock-offs just like the brand-names.  Because I like rhyming, I call these faux JoJo bows.  The color is what drew me ...

For me it's not officially spring until I see a butterfly.  I saw my first one about a week before the last wave of tornadoes came through, so it's been spring for me exactly that long.  But I'm only now trotting out the bow. Mama says that this is one of her favorite JoJo bows.  Usually I'm not a big fan of pastels...awww, who am I kidding?  I love pastels, though I don't love how pink gets forced down the throats of little girls.  Pink IS a nice color, but so are lots of other colors.  Now that I think of it...are these pastel butterflies, or are they more neon???  Maybe a little bit of both???  That green is pretty bright, after all, but it's also pretty light.  As I said above my feelings for pastels are a little complicated, I've always loved neon-colored anything.  Indeed, once FailBook had a slot on its profile layout for an individual's favorite colors, and the ones I listed were acid green, neon blue, hot pink, and oddly, black...

This one is one of those that came in a pair.  I may use the other one on one of my dolls, though these are big enuff that that would look kinda stupid. Time to share some Easter memories, since I love to tell stories.  Interestingly, my family was not churchgoing when I was small.  We believed very strongly in Jesus, but we were incredibly lazy.  But my mama wasn't too lazy to sometimes put on Easter egg hunts for us kids.  I distinctly remember one time, when I was about two or three, when she and Daddy did just that.  It was a gorgeous day, they'd set out plastic eggs in the backyard, and Mama led me by the hand to the various hiding places.  Now I was a child of simple pleasures; often my favorite toys were empty thread spools to roll around, film containers (y'all remember those?) to hide small things in, and brightly colored items like plastic Easter eggs.  Thus most of my eggs were empty, but a few did have loose change inside or Matchbox c...

Yesterday I wore my jelly bow and it didn't rain a drop.  Today I wore a bow that ISN'T jelly, and it's pouring!  That said, Easter/Resurrection Day isn't too far off!  Here's my bow for today; it's Peeps-themed! Some of these came in pairs and are presumably meant to top pigtails (or dog ears, as some of my older friends call them), but I don't have enuff hair for pigtails anymore, and they always looked kinda dumb on me anyway.  Go figure; my favorite American Girl doll looks great in pigtails.  Notice that she too is clad in bows; I hate bare rubber bands on doll hair...and people hair too, for that matter. Maybe Rita Cheryl's pigtails look better than mine because her hair is thicker than mine.  If you part my hair you can see clean through to my scalp.  My hair has always been thin; when I was a teenager it was so bad that during summertime I'd take a small paintbrush and paint sunblock on my part so that I wouldn't have a line of sunburn on...