I don’t know how we arrived here so quickly, but Easter is less than a month away; and we are delighting in the pastels popping up and the little spring joys that bring much needed light to this time of year. Preparing for Easter, as you know, also presents an invitation for me to return to one of my favorite pastimes—scouring the Internet for the best basket treasures. Stocking stuffers and Easter basket goodies are my favorite thing to shop for, and I do not take the job of finding cool stuff my kids will love lightly. Yes, there’s always the usual candy and sweets. But we also use filling the Easter basket as a good opportunity to replenish our craft bins and add some new books, games and fun little gifts to our home. We have some basket tradition staples—the kids always receive a new swimsuit, flip flops or sandals, a book and a plush (all three of my kids are still delighted by stuffed animals). The rest are fun little things I pick up along the way.

With no further ado, the 2021 Easter Basket Filler List:

1. Me Museum
I follow Compendium and love everything they put into the world. Their kids’ journals are brilliantly put together with creative prompts that are as fun to complete as they are meaningful to save forever. I bought this for Dash’s Easter Basket and can’t wait to watch him fill the pages.

2. Sunglasses
These are great for multiple sibling Easter baskets because they sell as an 8-pack. Make sure you use the drop down in Amazon to select the fun rainbow colored lens ones with clear frames. We bought these as party favors for Dash’s beach party and were so impressed by how nice they were. Everyone fought over who got what color. :o) We also love these fashionable sunglasses for little girls.

3. Ocean Bingo
The prettiest Bingo game you’ll own. Instead of B-18 and G-4, you’ll be calling out names of sea creatures with stunning illustrations while the kids learn more about ocean life.

4. Hope and Henry Girls Swimsuit
Our Easter baskets always have new swimsuits for the season. This is a new favorite of Nella’s from a company that produces high quality clothing with organic cotton at affordable prices.

5. Pastel Sidewalk Chalk
This is our favorite “special” sidewalk chalk for more elaborate drawings and vivid color that will stick. Yes, it washes off, but it takes longer and sometimes you have to use the hose. But it’s so good and offers a broader range of richer colors.

6. Giant Bubble Wand Kit
Perfect for warmer spring days, this kit has everything you need to make ginormous bubbles. Bonus—makes for some cute pictures.

7. Ooly Make No Mistake Markers
We have a lot of Ooly products in our craft carts, and these erasers markers are a favorite. 12 vibrant colors—one side of the marker draws and the other erases the color so you can make really cool textured designs.

8. Djeco Fashion Transfers
I used to use transfers as a kid and loved them, and now my kids love them. Use the three included vintage and retro themed boards as your background and the three sheets of 90 image transfers and rubbing tool to create fashion scenes.

9. eeboo Pretend Play Diner
Nella and Dash LOVE when Lainey plays restaurant with them, and this little set has everything you need—menus, guest checks, play money, plates and 17 different food choices. And it doesn’t take up a lot of storage because everything’s flat!

10. Hope and Henry Boys Swim Trunks
Same brand as Nella’s—high quality and the cutest gingham print which is all the rage right now.

11. Be Mindfulness Journal
Another amazing gem from Compendium, this kid journal has the most thoughtful writing and art prompts to help them feel their feelings, express themselves and be who they were meant to be.

12. Wiggly Worms
These silly little worms always provide so much entertainment for my kids. They make videos of them creeping along and add voices. We call them “shloobies,” and they are a big hit in our home.

13. Naples Soap Company Bath Bombs
Our favorite bath bombs come from a local company that now has 10 retail locations in Florida. My kids love picking out their scents and saving their bath bomb for the perfect bath night. Do the 5-for$25 bundle deal, distribute one in your kids’ baskets and save the rest for you. I love the Boyfriend scent, but the kids love the fun ones like Lucky Charms, Bubble Gum and Unicorn.

14. The Good Egg
The Easter Bunny always makes sure our baskets have new books in them, and this one is perfect for Easter—captivating illustrations about a cute little egg who is cracking under the pressure of always trying to be perfect.

15. Ooly Creatibles Erasers
This fun DIY is great for all ages—colorful chunks of clay you can mold into critters. And they erase pencil!

16. 8mm Slide Bracelets
This multipack (20 rainbow bracelets!) is great to distribute in multiple baskets or include a bunch in one so your kids can make bracelets for their friends. These are the base (8 mm rainbow silicone bracelets that adjust in size), and #17 below includes the charms to add.

17. Slide Bracelet Alphabet Charms
These rhinestone letter charms slide on to the the above wristbands to create personalized bracelets for friends. Includes 130 charms, A-Z.

18.Cats & Dogs Guess Meow
This is a super cute take on the “Guess Who” game and a great game for all ages. We love everything Mudpuppy makes.

19. Wonder Women—A Go Fish Game
This card set is beautifully illustrated and invites kids to learn more about some amazing women who have contributed to history with their talents, words and actions. There are a number of little games you can play with them, and they come with a small booklet with facts about each women pictured. Nella has learned so many women’s names through these cards and little tidbits about who they were (singer, painter, writer, scientist, etc.).

20. Camera Bubble Machine
How cute is this bubble camera? Instead of taking pictures, it releases a bubbles. Anything bubble related is good for any gift, any age and a guaranteed moment of delight.

21. Kid Made Modern Ice Cream Craft Set
I heard the Easter Bunny is bringing this for my kids this year, and I’m excited because I know it will be one of their favorite basket gifts and give them something to do together. Design your own ice cream cones with cardboard cones that can be painted and filled with the cutest creative buffet of craft supplies.

22. Sea Star Sparkle Sunscreen
They’ll never roll their eyes again when you ask them to stop playing to come get slathered in sunscreen. This SPF 30 sunscreen is made with eco-friendly biodegradable glitter for a sparkly sheen. And it smells like marshmallows!

23. Taco Takeover Game
This is the year of games for us and probably a lot of you too. We love games that the whole family can play and ones with concepts that aren’t too complex to exclude Nella and Dash. This is a fun speed game where race against your opponents to correctly fill your taco order.

24. Wow in the World Book
If you like to include books in your baskets, this is a new fun one I shared in stories. My cousin bought it for Dash because he’s always been so fascinated by the human body and all the weird stuff it does. This book is filled with fun illustrations, cheeky humor and loads of information that answer all the question about the human body we’re afraid to ask—pee and poop and sweat and snot.

25. Waboba Wingman Disc
The modern frisbee that won’t hurt if it hits you.

26. Animal Park Puzzle Erasers
We love Japanese stationery and office products (Lainey is obsessed with kawaii anything). These Japanese erasers are so cute—they look just like Calico Critters.

27. eeBoo Crazy Faces Card Game
eeBoo is another favorite brand of ours. This fun card game is a wacky take on Crazy Eights.

28. Emily McDowell’s Pep Talk Postcards
Love these for preteen and teen girls—encourages them to send words of encouragement to their friends.

29. Kid Made Modern Woven Wall Hanging
Weaving projects are so in, and this one is fun and kid-friendly.

30. Mini Cupcake Puzzle
100-piece puzzles are the sweet spot for our family, and this one is a bright happy colorful one for Easter.

31. Rainbow Air-Dry Clay
More arts and crafts fun, these pouches of air dry clay provide hours of fun. Look at the product picture of the little yarn baskets and piggy—so cute!

32. One Color a Day Sketchbook
I can’t decide if I’m going to put this in Lainey’s Easter basket or if I’m going to keep it for myself, but I LOVE this simple creative concept of journaling daily colors that represent your feelings each day and naming the colors.

33.Folkmanis Bunny Finger Puppet
These little Folkmanis puppets have ended up on so many of my Easter Basket lists over the years, but I can’t help myself. They’re so cute and realistic and make the cutest little spring-themed treasure for baskets.

34. LED Finger Rockets
These have Dash’s name all over them, and I love that they light up for night time fun.

35. Paper Airplane Kit
20 paper airplanes that customize with cool patterned paper and stickers.

36. Scattergories Card Game
This is a new favorite for our family this year and a simplified version of the original Scattergories game. I love that everyone can play. Nella LOVES thinking of words to fit in the categories.

37. And the People Stayed Home
The perfect book to add to your collection this year, this beautifully illustrated book captures the hardship and the beauty of what we’ve all gone through this year.

38. Djeco Scratch Cards
Scratch cards are always fun, but these are especially beautiful with illustration guidelines that help kids create these colorful masterpieces with scratch art.

39. Monchichi Mothercare
I LOVED Monchichis when I was a kid. This one with the little baby attached—adorable. I know what my kids are tickled by, and they are going to LOVE this.

Next week, it will have been one year since the pandemic hit and everything changed. Like many others, I’m remembering where we were last March and what we’ve learned in this strange year that’s followed.

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Early last March, we were preparing to embark on a road trip through Savannah to the beaches of North Carolina for a travel partnership I had accepted for spring break. The virus had just hit the United States in a way that made us slightly cautious for travel, but no one could have known what was coming. We chose to drive instead of fly. I packed hand sanitizer and made homemade bleach mixtures in travel-sized spray bottles which I intended to use on restaurant tables, but that was as severe a definition of precaution my brain could come up with at the time. No one in the country was wearing masks, and the term “social distancing” hadn’t quite made its 2020 debut for us yet. So off we went, doing what we love to do best on trips. We explored the old riverfront streets, tried the recommended shrimp boil in Savannah, the fried pickles in Wilmington. We stopped at every charming bookstore in between—there were many—and walked the neighborhood blocks near our rented house like they were our own. The memories we made on that trip are glorious and little did we know, a last hoorah before the chaos.

Somewhere between Wilmington and Savannah, I got nervous. We had stopped at a Target on what we had hoped would be a drawn out and enjoyable trip back home, but I sensed the shift. You could feel it in the air—this cloud. People were scared. I had picked up enough bits and pieces of news on our trip to think to grab some Lysol and hand sanitizer to bring home, but the cleaning supply aisles were stripped bare. Two more stores in Savannah confirmed it—sanitizing products were wiped out and slowly other necessities were dwindling. There’s something eerie about seeing rows of completely empty shelves, especially when you’re away from home.

It was clear from the news updates, we needed to return home quickly. Friends were reporting grocery store chaos, and our home was in no way prepared for the overwhelming advice of “stock up” we were hearing. We didn’t know yet that our kids would never return to school that year, that all our planned trips would be canceled or that Brett would later lose the job he loved. We wouldn’t have believed if anyone told us a year later we’d have lost over 500,000 Americans to this, that half the country’s kids still wouldn’t be back in school in a year or that trips to the grocery store would someday mean connecting with strangers only through eyes that peer over masks.

We came home and stocked up the freezer, ordered puzzles and card games and crafts. We watched Wuhan on the TV. Then Italy. We cried seeing footage of Italian villagers singing from their rooftops, eerie empty streets between them, and the exhausted health care workers breaking down in overcrowded hospitals. I called friends, and we commiserated about our fears. “What if this lasts a long time? What if Brett loses his job? What if someone we love gets really sick?”

School was cancelled for another two weeks. “We can do this!” I told myself. “I was made for this!”  And like everyone else, I didn’t realize my reserves of optimism, creativity and can-do-it-ness would have to last as long as they’ve had to, so I spent it all in the beginning and then borrowed more against my future self. We made forts, watched movies, created pretend restaurants. I attempted bread making, hosted courses, started a book proposal. An adorable classroom was erected in our dining room, and I wrote positive quotes about home learning on a chalk board with a special teacher chalk holder I bought because—get this—I was so excited about teaching my kids from home.

When the e-mails came from the district announcing virtual learning for the rest of the year, we were asked to pick up our kids’ belongings in an organized operation that would keep everyone safe. I wore sunglasses because I couldn’t stop the tears from spilling as I pulled my car up to the line of masked teachers who handed me plastic bags filled with Dash’s text books and Nella’s folders and crayon boxes stuffed with all the little treasures my kids had kept hidden in their desks that year—Shopkins, smelly erasers, hair ties and pencil toppers. I whispered to one of the teachers “We miss you guys so much” before I drove away, and I cried again in the garage when I returned home because I knew this was a much bigger deal I thought it would be the first time Publix ran out of Lysol. I thought about all the kids—yours and mine, and how this had become something they’d never forget. And our school—the thought of it empty during what was always such a vibrant time of year broke my heart—like driving by your childhood home where all the neighborhood kids used to play in the sprinkler and seeing it boarded up and neglected.

It’s been a year now. My kids are back to school, and the desk and chalkboard I was once so excited to have displayed in our dining room have been removed and relocated to other areas of the house. Given the heartbreaking reports of so many spent mothers still supervising virtual learning while juggling job duties and tending to stressed screen-weary kids, I’m grateful my kids are back in their classrooms with teachers who are showing up in this brokenness the best way they can. But school is not the same, and it shows in a multitude of ways. I send them off every morning more covered—in masks, in sanitizer and in prayers; and yet it feels the opposite—like they’ve never been more emotionally exposed in a colder environment behind walls I haven’t seen in over a year.

I am acutely aware of our privilege and the ways we are lucky this year. We have a roof over our heads, food in our pantry, beaches to visit and healthy grandparents who are are now getting vaccinated. Brett and I daily affirm our gratitude for all the little ways we’ve experienced joy this year—that’s important. And yet it is naive to assume that those spared from the pandemic’s darkest clouds aren’t still hurting, breaking under the weight of collective loss and making their way through the aftermath of stress and loneliness, relationship and mental health challenges. We are all faced with monumental effects from a year’s loss of the everyday constant vibrant connection we didn’t even realize was stitching us all together.

Travel, work trips, healthy distractions, changes of scenery, spontaneity, events, promising opportunities, bustling communities and the freedom from exhaustion of making decisions about what’s safe and not safe, responsible or ill-advised—I took it all for granted and the way it provided a current of constant forward motion I felt a part of and an inspiration that continually sparked my creativity. Personally, I’m spinning my wheels without them, feeling a little bit lost; but I know I’m not alone.

As more light peers in from the end of the cave for all of us, I continue to cling to gratitude for what we have and to gentleness for myself—letting these feelings exist without pressure to perform and hustle or the need to constantly feel enthusiastic and inspired. We’ll take baby steps out of this slump of a year, cherishing the good moments that sustain us and showing up throughout the less inspired ones as best as we can.

Lately what’s helping me: working out (something about lifting heavy weights makes me feel like I’m conquering something), making lists (planning for the anything in the future feels good), painting things that have need to be painted in our house, new recipes (two last week!), small donations to worthy causes, signing up to help (signed up for Lasagna Love this week and can’t wait to make our first lasagna), thinking about summer, leaving the house for small adventures to clear our minds and reporting the small tasks I completed out loud at the end of the day as if they are huge accomplishments that required loads of effort: “I sent two e-mails!” (pause for clapping) “I put my makeup back in my makeup case instead of leaving it spread all over the counter!” (pause for parade) “I put more than $5 in my gas tank!” (holding hand out for trophy).

Holding lots of hope for the world as it slowly reawakens to normalcy and love for all those who are tired, lost and beginning again.

There is more. xo

We’ve always been a crafty art-loving family, but the pandemic has definitely invited us to spend more time making art this year, especially Lainey—and it’s been so rewarding! It is not unusual to find Lainey on any given day at the kitchen barstools, surrounded by watercolor palettes and art books for a good two-hour creative session. Over the years, we’ve collected some great art books that we frequently pull out for good creative inspiration. I’ve shared some of these on Instagram, but they deserve a nice round-up in one place.

Extraordinary Things to Cut Out and Collage
This one is our current favorite; and it’s given us so many hours of creative fun. Friday night, we sat at the dining room table cutting and collaging for SIX HOURS. There are 10,000 different things to cut out in the book—everything from pop culture art and vintage photographs to architecture, botanicals and travel images. We collage onto thick watercolor paper and card stock, or— if we really want to get fancy—these wooden panels.

50 Ways to Draw Your Beautiful, Ordinary Life
Any creative book published by Flow is going to be chock-full of creative inspiration, and this one is quite the buffet. So much happiness in one place and easy-to-follow practical guidance for illustrating everyday objects with a a whimsical style.

20 Ways to Draw a Dress
I’ve used this book so many times to help me follow shapes for clothing drawings (clothing is so fun to draw!). It’s less a step-by-step how-to art book and more an inspiration book with so many adorable drawings of all different styles of clothes with lines and shapes that are easy to replicate as a you draw your own. This is actually part of an entire “20 Ways to Draw” series, and we have several of the books including Draw 500 Everyday Things and 20 Ways to Draw a Chair (household items).

Emily Lex Watercolor Workbook
I was thrilled over the holidays to see my friend and insanely talented watercolor artist Emily offer a holiday watercolor workbook. I ordered it for Lainey and within days, she had finished every painting and asked if she had other books. She does! Yay! This animal one is available year round. Lainey’s finished it as well and is waiting for more of Emily’s workbooks (hint hint, Emily!). She may not have more workbooks coming, but Emily’s beautiful book, Freely and Lightly comes out March 2. I have an early copy, and it’s a work of art.

Watercolor With Me Ocean
After Emily’s books hooked Lainey on watercolor, we searched for books similar to it and found Dana Fox’s books. This one is tucked away in the Easter Basket pile. It’s beautiful—all pages thick watercolor with color palette suggestions and rough sketches of each ocean creature already drawn. 

Watercolor With Me Forest
Another Dana Fox watercolor workbook just like the ocean one, but forest friends as the painting subjects.

…and some watercolor extras we try to keep on hand: I like to keep 9 x 12 watercolor paper stocked (we usually just buy it in a pad at Michael’s) as well as these Watercolor Post Cards that are fun for small paintings. We have several watercolor palettes. This starter set is perfect for kids. Target also sells the Kid Made Modern one which is great. I also love the color choices in this one.

Happy Creating!