Easter

This year we organized an Easter Egg hunt with some local friends on Saturday.  It was a huge success.  I plan on doing this every year!  It's fun to throw a party when there's no clean up (before or after) involved.  We just set a date and time, and told each family to bring 10 eggs per kid to be hidden.  We did our best to corral the kids on one side of the park while the dads hid the eggs on the other side.  I tried to get some games going, but the kids were pretty anxious to get hunting.  We managed to get a semi good game of duck duck goose (I tried calling it chick chick bunny, but I think that confused most of the kids...)

Then we let the kids go find eggs - releasing them by age (2 and under, then 4 and under, etc.) and told each kid to only find 10 eggs and then stop looking.  We had at least 50 people there, friends from work, our neighbors and church friends, and we were pretty much the only people at the park.  The weather was perfect, in the 70's and sunny, which is warm for early spring here.

Olivia with one of her best buds, Eliza.

The kids also got their Easter baskets from the Easter bunny on Saturday morning.  Levi loved his new ball.  He's pretty easy to please!

Here's some photos I took of the kids in their Easter duds.  I can't resist dressing the boys  up a like on Easter.  There's got to be something fun about dressing little boys, and Easter is one of those things.

We had a fun meal of ham, asparagus, homemade rolls and strawberry pie.  Sam helped the kids do origami lotus flower for place settings and we turned the napkins in to festive little bunnies.  Sometimes on holidays like this I envy people who have lots of family around, but at the same time, I really enjoy it being just us, and pretty laid back.

Easter

We had another fun Easter this year.  On Saturday we dyed eggs (I tried my hand at blowing them out, so that we could use them for decorations.  You can see some of my failed attempts in the background...),

And the Easter bunny brought tote bags filled with some treasures.  Olivia kept referring to the Easter Bunny as "the monster", as she would pull each item from her bag, she would exclaim, "Look what the monster brought me!"  Gives me a little insight into what she thinks about when I tell her someone mysterious is going to come and leave things for her during the night!

 

Here the kids are on Easter Sunday.  I got to teach Sharing time in Primary, and so that was a lot of fun.  Olivia had to stay home sick with dad, as she had another cold, and couldn't attend nursery.  But I still got her dressed up in her Easter dress and snapped a picture. 

More Easter Pics

as promised...

Spring Celebrations

This year, taking the lead from my friend Kim, we decided to do our commercial "Easter" celebrations (you know, the bunny, egg hunts, candy stuff) on the first day of spring. This year it worked out rather nicely since March 20th was on a Saturday, and I knew we were going to be recovering from our San Diego trip on Easter weekend.  I think it worked out pretty well, although it seemed strange to try and explain to people wy we did "Easter" a couple weeks early. And the boys have eagerly tried to explain to their friends, "The Spring bunny came to our house.  It's the same bunny as the Easter Bunny, but you can ask him to come for spring instead.  Then you can focus on the Resurrection for Easter."  Their friends just look at them very confused.  I think I might just stick to the Saturday before in the future, but this year it was perfect.

I found some great things in the dollar spot at Target.  I really don't like giving too much candy on holidays - I end up eating too much of it, and my kids get hyper and crazy.  But at Target they had some cute Beatrix Potter themed sticker sets and little board books, which the boys loved.  They also got some egg shaped sidewalk chalk, and a few other toys (playdough and slinkies).  The only candy was hidden in eggs around the house.

They loved hunting for the eggs.  Here's Harrison finding an egg in the kids dishes.

Olivia got a little purse (also from the dollar spot at Target). She likes to put it on her arm, wave and say "bye-bye" and then leave the room. 

I really did like celebrating spring - I was so ready for spring to come, and it was really here on March 20th. After having our little egg hunt, we headed off to Mount Vernon.

More Easter

The boys and I had fun dying easter eggs on Friday. Harrison also decided that hard-boiled eggs were an acceptable food (the white part at least), and ate quite a few dyed eggs over the weekend.

Noah just liked looking at them, and peeling them...

Olivia just watched. (and ate Harrison's yolks.)

And here are some pictures from Easter Sunday. We had a white Easter, but it wasn't from snow. Our cherry blossoms were everywhere, covering our cars, walkway and driveway.