Easter this year was good. It usually is, but for reasons I'll get into later, I think this year went really well.
It's too hard to get my entire side of the family together more than once a month so we had our Easter Egg Hunt at my mom's on birthday Sunday, two weeks before Easter. It was pretty cold and there was even snow on the ground that morning. My parents were planning on having the hunt inside. As horrible and terrifying as that sounds, they figured it would still be better than trying to get everyone together again before Easter. Well, we had a pre-Easter miracle. Just hours before the scheduled hunt, the weather cleared and even warmed up to a decent temperature.
The boys all had fun and found all their eggs in a decent amount of time. I apologize to Jonathan for using this picture. Brigham is
notorious for his disinterest in camera posing and this time he was actually willing, albeit briefly, to pose and say "cheese" with his brothers so I had to use it.
I originally thought we'd spend time with Jaaromy's family on Easter Sunday but it was switched to the Saturday before so that they could play basketball and celebrate Connor's birthday. Lyenna brought paper so the kids could make bunny ears(super cute!) and Megan brought coloring pages. Nathaniel just wanted to play his DS and Jonathan wanted to play basketball with the grown-ups. But Brigham surprised me and colored for at least 15 minutes!
This left Sunday open for just our family. I didn't really have it all planned out and at first it didn't look like we were going to do anything. We have 9:00 church and so Jaaromy and I still needed to take a nap. But once we got that out of the way we colored eggs.
Brigham loves to say "cheese" now, so I'm obliged to take his picture.
I only did a dozen and we lost one egg in the cooking process, but it didn't feel too short. I think that's because Jaaromy decided to do the shrink-wrap thing on them. Our kit came with about six plastic wrap-thingys for the eggs. You slip them on and then use a blow dryer to melt the plastic so it fits around the egg. It seemed like too much trouble to me but Jaaromy wanted to give it a try. Turns out the kids, even Brigham, thought it was super cool and we did it for as many eggs as we could.
After dinner I made sugar cookies to decorate and while they cooled we had a little Easter Egg hunt. These are special eggs that we use to talk about Jesus' Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Nathaniel and Jonathan were following each other around, anxious to find an egg before his brother.
After the boys had found all the eggs we went inside to open them up and see what was inside.
Each egg had a little object inside and a scripture talking about what it means. One had nails in it for the cross, one had 3 dimes in it for the 30 pieces of silver, and another had a white cloth in it for wrapping Jesus' body to be placed in the tomb. The very last egg is the best one because it's empty, just like the tomb on the third day. We did this last year but I think the boys were more into it this year. I think it helped that we hunted for them, it made them more excited to see what was inside.
After the egg lesson we decorated sugar cookies. Macey's often sells sugar cookies along with some bags of frosting and sprinkles to decorate. We've done that a few times but the cookies aren't that good, so I decided that I would make our own. I didn't want to do it from scratch though so I used a mix. The only problem is the mix isn't stiff enough to cut out shapes. So I got this Easter form pan.
They were tasty and all, but a little too thick and it was hard to tell what the shapes were. Maybe I didn't do it right, I don't know. It didn't use all the dough so I just made regular circular cookies with the rest. Those are the ones the boys chose, so I guess the form pan didn't win anyone over that night.
Turns out that the sugar cookie mix has a recipe for cut-out cookies on the back. That was not the case last time I looked. Next time I am totally going to do that one.
It was a wonderful Easter.
