Four Easters

If you've ever seen the film 'Four Christmases', you'll have a vague idea of how my Easter panned out. Now I'm no Reese Witherspoon and H is no Vince Vaughn (thank God), but their frantic attempt to get around all four sets of divorced parents to celebrate the holiday is grimly familiar. H and I were both born to entirely incompatible couples who, in their own good time, saw the error of their ways and parted company.

They've all now found the yin to their yang and have remarried (some more than once, but we'll gloss over that). When we were younger, the emotional upheaval was more than made up for with double the presents on birthdays and at Christmas, extra pocket money and other guilt-induced treats. Now, however, it's just an administrative nightmare. I'll leave you to imagine the logistics of the top table at our wedding; it was so long that it may have spanned different time zones (a sure-fire way to keep any potentially warring factions apart, at least).

Once we were married I had to face the fact that I could no longer just enjoy Christmas and Easter with my own (two sets of) parents but had to join H's (two sets of) parents to celebrate with them as well. It was bad enough when it was just the two of us enduring the lonely drive up the A1 on Christmas day, but with a baby it's so much worse. For a start, Little Boy has increased our popularity tenfold; he is most definitely the star of the show and everyone wants a piece of him. He's the first grandchild, so I get it, but I can think of better ways of spending our bank holidays than criss-crossing the north of England with nursery rhymes on loop. There are times when I think it would be rather nice to just hole up somewhere cosy and receive guests like a monarch of some sort. That said, we had a lovely Easter. It's almost always worth the effort and at least we don't have to worry about cooking. And we drove home with double the amount of Easter eggs than we should have. Some things never change.