Easter 2014

The last few years we've been fortunate to have my parents visiting with us for Easter, because it has coincided with my mom's spring break. But Easter was later this year or something, and so we didn't haven any family in town. So it felt a little more low key, but it was still a lovely day. We had participated in some of Rez's Holy Week services, but it's a lot harder to engage all of them with two little ones in the picture. So we tag-teamed Easter Vigil on Saturday, and enjoyed Church together Sunday morning.

I had been thinking about finding Easter baskets for the girls, but our house was built in the 1930's - and thus we have very little storage space and no garage. So I decided to make some "Easter bags" for this girls instead - less space and they can be used throughout the year as book bags, etc. I made some for Judah and Jalayna as well, since they were joining our egg hunt.

Madeline was pretty happy with what showed up in her Easter bag this year - her favorites were the sunglasses, and the color wonder markers and Micky coloring book. She is obsessed with markers and pens, but I never let her play with them because she gets them everywhere. But Color Wonder markers only work on color wonder paper, and alas, no mess! 

This is Madeline with a thumbs up saying "cool dude!" She indeed felt pretty cool working with all these markers. 

We hosted an Easter dinner at our house with some friends from small group, and James prepared Leg of Lamb for the first time. It was delicious! He made several slits in the lamb the night before and stuffed it with garlic and rosemary, and then made a Greek yogurt sauce to go with it. I think he felt like there was room for improvement next year, but I thought it was great!

The Easter egg hunt was fun, although Madeline felt she had to stop with every egg and eat every single piece of candy before she moved onto the next egg. So we eventually had to pick up the pace and cut off the chocolate IV action. 

We spent some time trying to teach Madeline about Easter this year. We gave her the run-down of the Easter story on a couple of different occasions. After having heard the story a few times, I asked Madeline if she could tell me why we celebrate Easter. She had two statements: "Jesus has owies," and "Jesus should say NO to mean people." So yeah, maybe we'll pick up a few more pieces of the story next year!