MARK MY WORD: THE GRASS IS GREENER IN OUR LIVING ROOM

The grass can't be greener than in our living room. It's in our dining room too, and scattered across our kitchen floor like so much straw in a barn.

It ought to be illegal to have this much grass in a house.

But this isn't the smoking kind that gets you in trouble with the DEA.

No, this is the perfectly legal, Easter kind that drives parents crazy. The kind that starts out as bright green decoration in your children's Easter baskets.

What was the Easter bunny thinking when he brought this stuff to our house?

It would have been OK if the stuff had stayed in the Easter baskets. But as parents know, nothing stays in the Easter basket for long.

By the end of Easter, the stuff had migrated throughout the house like a bad science experiment.

Every time I picked up some of the artificial grass, more of the green stuff seemed to appear on the floor, clinging to my sockets.

It's amazing how this green stuff multiplies. It's as bad as Easter candy.

By the end of Easter Sunday, our daughter, Becca, had amassed enough candy from Easter egg hunts to open her own candy shop.

This candy carnival was lost on our youngest daughter. Just a few months old, Bailey, could care less about chocolate bunnies. Just give her a bottle and she's fine.

But at age 4, Becca knows the true meaning of Easter: candy.

Like most other children, Becca spent Easter on a sugar high. She could have out hopped the Easter bunny last weekend.

Joni and I had to munch on some chocolate just to keep up with her.

Even then, we couldn't approach her energy level. NASA could power the space shuttle with the energy generated by Easter candy.

Kids, we've discovered, no longer want to hunt out real, decorated eggs. They want those colorful plastic eggs, filled with enough candy to sugar coat the world.

It's truly amazing how children can find those hidden eggs. They seem to have built-in radar to track down Easter eggs, but nothing else.

Ask them to find their shoes and they haven't a clue where they are, even when the shoes are sitting right out in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Kids love holidays, particularly when candy is involved.

As parents, we are just getting to the end of the Halloween and Christmas candy when Easter rolls around and dumps some more candy in our homes.

Try to find candy in the stores this week. You can't. The shelves are bare.

They were bare Saturday night when Joni sent me out to get Robin Eggs -- not the Mother Nature kind -- but the candy kind.

The only Easter candy left on the shelves of one major discount store looked like it had just gone through the war in Bosnia.

Even the Easter bunny would turn up its nose at the few bags of picked over candy that were on the shelves that night.

I managed, however, to find a bag of Robin Eggs that was less mauled than the others and immediately bought it.

Of course, in the end, I don't think it mattered. Becca had more candy than she could count.

Now that Easter is over, Joni and I can concentrate on hiding the candy and not the eggs.

As parents, you can only endure so many candy days a year where children are concerned.

After that, you have to cancel the candy in a big way. There's no telling how much candy parents throw out over the course of a year.

I'm sure it's enough to fill all the store shelves ten times over.

Of course, if we saved all that candy we wouldn't have to go out and buy it all over again the next year.

But that wouldn't be any fun. No self respecting Easter bunny would hand out year-old candy.

Now, grass is a different story. That Easter greenery can last a lifetime, especially when it is embedded in your living room carpet.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.