Easter Weekend

What a fun, full weekend! We started things off Saturday afternoon at my uncle's house. His wife had gone to a TON of work to prepare a great Easter party, focused primarily on activities for the kids. They started out making bunny bags for the egg hunt.

(oops, this was after Lucy's bunny's nose fell off)
A "special visitor" stopped by for about half an hour; Noah didn't particularly want to pose with him and I wasn't going to make him. They all knew that it was just a person dressed up, and Lucy asked me who it was (like, an uncle, or whatever). When I told her it was just some guy dressed up in a bunny suit that they'd hired, she looked at me with a shocked expression and said, "So you mean I just HUGGED a STRANGER???" When I compared it to hugging Mickey at Disneyland, she felt better.

Here are my kids with most of their cousins and second cousins.

Then they looked all over my uncle's big backyard for eggs.

They played pin the tail on the bunny, and had a relay race.

There was a lot of great food, and lots of extended family; plenty adults too, who I did not think to take any pictures of! But in addition to most of my family (mom, sisters, brothers-in-law), there were lots of extended family members like my cousins & their families, my grandma, my aunt's daughter & her husband and his parents, my aunt's sister and her husband, my aunt's sister's daughter & her husband & daughter, my mom's cousin's ex-wife... yeah it was quite a group but all great people and it was really fun to get together. Next time I'll take pictures of the grown-ups!

That evening back at home we finally got around to painting eggs. The kids really love doing this every year. While they did this, we talked about the *real* purpose/reason for Easter and read scriptures about Jesus' resurrection.

On Easter morning the kids got their baskets, and I learned that they're not too old to enjoy bubbles!

They hunted for their eggs (the Easter Bunny always hides the hard-boiled, colored eggs). Who can spot a hidden egg in this picture?

Somehow after all the morning festivities we were able to get ready to leave for church by 9:45am; that's when I had to be there (45 min early) to practice with the choir.

We enjoyed a fantastic Sacrament meeting that was FULL of music (my favorite kind of meeting!) and great lessons in church, learning more about final days of the Savior's life on the earth, and His glorious resurrection.

Sunday afternoon we went to my parents' house for a very delicious Easter dinner with my siblings, their families, and my grandma. The weather was perfect and the kids played outside together after dinner until it was time to go home. I didn't remember to bring my camera; darn!

I almost forgot this little detail: on Saturday afternoon our hot water heater stopped working. Lovely! So Saturday night when I was up late preparing food for Easter dinner, gathering my music for church, and making other Eastery preparations, we were boiling water on the stove to wash dishes. And then, Sunday morning, we enjoyed COLD showers. Brrrr!! On Sunday night the kids needed bathing but I didn't want them to have to freeze, so I let them take baths and I had three burners on the stove going at once, heating water in my three biggest pots (including my water bath canner), and hauling it upstairs to the bathtubs. I got a pretty good system down and it only took about 20 minutes to heat enough water for both tubs. Aaron fixed the hot water heater last night though, so no more boiling water for washing dishes and no more cold showers; hooray! It's amazing the things we take for granted.

I hope you all had a fantastic Easter weekend!