This Easter we returned to Pinstripes for brunch on Easter with the Isabella’s family. We had our expensive brunch, and went back out to the bank of the Potomac to have our Easter Egg hunt. The kids had a great time and after they had brought in the eggs, Albert told them, “save 5 eggs to give to other kids who come by.” Curie put aside her five and Elia held up her finger and said, “only one” and proceeded to open up all of her eggs.
Well the first kid comes by and we encourage Curie to go give the boy an egg, she does and has this amazing smile on her face when she returns. “It feels so good to give,” she says – mind you she is six. Elia wants to give eggs too but wants to give Curie’s eggs not her own. Curie gives a few more and then starts putting more in the “give” pile instead of the “keep” pile.
After giving away more than 10 eggs she starts putting her candy and toys back into eggs and putting them into the “give” pile. She even put the money back in the golden eggs she got to give away. Elia gets more and more agitated and though she is helping give away Curie’s eggs, she keeps asking Curie for more for herself. And while we thought it was that she just wanted more eggs at first, when Elia started crying we realized that she was jealous not of not getting more eggs, but that Curie was giving her eggs to other children instead of her, that she was somehow not the recipient of Curie’s caring. That was a revelation, a little heartbreaking, and beautiful in its own right.
In the end Curie gave away all of her eggs, we are guessing almost 30 of them; we rewarded her with Legos for her generosity. Her only requirement was that they had to be little kids and even then she was giving them out to teenagers who were siblings of little kids too. It was astounding and beautiful to watch – we taught her the lesson “smile and you are automatically pretty, beauty though, comes from within” when she was two and a half, to see her internalize it so well comes from inside her not from us.