Easter

Our family had a fantastic Easter this year. We dyed eggs on Saturday (which to be honest, I totally don't get or really like this tradition. All we do is dye our eggs, which means there isn't much creativity involved and then w/in a day we peel them and eat them all in egg salad or deviled eggs so the prettiness doesn't last....but the kids love it, so we'll do it...). Sunday we went to church. Oh wait, back up, first John took Jamie to Urgent Care because he'd been dealing with what we thought were intense allergies for a week or two. We saw improvement (somewhat) when we gave him Claratin so I figured that was it. But then he had several night when he woke up crying so hard he nearly vomited, covered in rashes-some of them so deep they looked like welts-and eyes swollen so bad he could hardly open them. So after the second night of this, John decided to take him to Urgent Care the next morning, which happened to be Easter morning. Turns out Jamie had Strep! He didn't have the sore throat but Strep doesn't always manifest itself like that-sometimes it's just a bad rash. The doctor said he was only contagious if his mucus (ie, his spit, runny nose, etc) touch someone else and he said we could go to church. Jamie sat in John's lap the whole time. Coughing and sneezing wasn't a big issue with this illness so I'm happy to say that even though he was in church he didn't infect anyone since we didn't let him get close to anyone and he wasn't sneezing or coughing.

After church we came home and got ready for my family and a friend to come over. Fortunately Honey Bake Ham did nearly all the cooking so it was relatively stress free for me. My favorite part of Easter was the egg hunt, which we got to do with my sister and the kids' cousin this year. It is so fun seeing the kids get so excited trying to find eggs, running all around, happy smiles and giggles.
It's really important to me that even the very youngest get to participate in Holiday traditions, so John held up Libby to an egg that was easy for her to grab. Even with it being similar color to the handles, she found it right away! And actually the prize inside happened to be a little plastic squeak duck. So not only did she get to do the egg hunt, she got a prize she could actually play with!
We had to make Anne stop looking for eggs because near the end there were about 10 or 15 eggs left and Anne had already found nearly half of all the eggs we put out! She got quite a bit more than her younger cousin and brother.
I have one egg that has 2 special candies in it and that egg is the prize egg. Whoever gets it gets the bigger chocolate bunny. Even with Jamie being able to find eggs this year and adding Andrina to the mix, Anne *still* won! She is now the 3 year champ!
I also read an idea for Easter about doing an egg toss. All the kids did was take some of the plastic eggs and try and throw them in their Easter baskets several feet away, a la Bozo Buckets. The one with the most got to pick a prize first, second most, second, etc. The prizes were little toys I had collected and not yet used from Happy meals and Target $1 section. The kids were thrilled with this though.

Our dinner was quite yummy and easy and free of stress, again thanks to Honey Baked Ham! But of course the best thing about Easter was remembering that Our Savior had Risen on that day and death and sin no longer have a hold on us! Alleluia He has Risen!! He has risen indeed! Alleluia!