I'm Dreaming of a White...Easter?

After all the travelling and Mommy ickiness around here (although it feels like I am nearly through it! Thank God for week 12!), we didn't get to decorating for or preparing for Easter until yesterday. While Adam shuttled one child after the other to one soccer game then the next, I spent the day scouring the nasty house, that had not had a good deep clean for about 7 weeks (sorry to everyone that saw me outside of my house yesterday after all the cleaning of home and not myself), and setting up our few Easter decorations (Adam said, "Why even do it? The holiday is over after tomorrow." Why? Because I must! My three St. Patty's day decorations were completely ignored, I can't do the same to Easter. So forgive me if I have bunnies and eggs in my house until late May).

I love Easter: the beautiful music, the deep meaning it has to those of the Christian faith, the chance it gives me to reflect on my own personal faith, and the incredible love and heartbreak I feel as I think about the sacrifice of our Savior. But it also has a lot of fun family traditions that go along with it that have nothing to do with the actual purpose of the holiday. And we love those too.

We started the Easter celebration with the beloved dying of eggs. This year we only ended up with one big red stain on the counter! That's a record! Usually we have a rainbow of stains stretching from floor to table to clothing to bodies...and that's even with a table cloth down.

It was Luke's first experience as an egg dyer. It didn't take much time for him to dive right in!

I guess we did have a little more than the one red stain. Look at those sweet, green, chubby toddler hands. I love it! And they matched the green stripe in his Easter shirt so nicely.

Sunday morning, thanks to wonderful pregnancy insomnia, this Easter bunny got up at 5:30am to hide some eggs...hey, I was up anyway. However, after looking out the window at the wet falling snow, the bunny decided upon an indoor hunt. This picture is from right after the boys woke up, but before we left for church at 12:40 we had about 4-inches and the roads, which at first looked like they might not get any cover, were quite covered.

But the bunny still filled baskets, with candy, flashy wind twirly things, and very exciting books. Here's Ben with his new favorite book, The Boys Book of Survival. All morning and afternoon he has been detailing everything from how he will protect us from an attack by the Abominable Snowman or how he will help us build a shelter next time we go camping, if we happen to forget our tent (which is likely with my prego brain, for example, Friday I left the Papa Murphy's pizzas on the roof of the car and didn't realize it until I got home and couldn't find them. After driving back, they kindly just gave me two more)!

These boys liked their books too and requested an immediate reading.There's the twirly wind thingies (thank you King Sooper's holiday aisle)...should be fun to put out in the yard...once it stops snowing!
Then it was time for the indoor egg hunt! Luke was pretty quick at finding his four eggs, but was more interested in the plastic ones that rattled--once he realized there were jelly beans inside.

Zach and Ben's were pretty hard to find, sneaky bunny, but fortunately they are good seekers. Thank goodness, since it was the pregnant and sleepy bunny who hid the eggs: meaning the location of some of the eggs was a mystery even to mom and dad by that hour. We won't have any games of "find the stinky smell" in two weeks!

All sixteen eggs accounted for...plus one plastic jelly bean-filled egg and one golf ball.
After a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and copious amounts of candy (no one ate the golf ball), the boys got snazzed up for church. Here are my sweet Easter boys in their cheerful Easter outfits! Our church service was lovely, a perfect Easter message with wonderful music. It was funny to see how many of us mommies of all boys at church did our Easter clothing shopping at The Children's Place this year, but none of the boys actually matched each other to a T. They all just coordinated nicely!
And one for the record books. What handsome laddies I have! Wrong holiday? Oh well, I was down for the count on St. Patty's Day, I have to let a bit of that Irish spirit out!

The only thing missing from the day was our extended family. We miss our Washington family so much!! We were planning on dinner with our Colorado family, Adam's cousins who live near-by, but the snow unhappily cancelled those plans. So we are settling down to a brown sugar ham (fortunately, they had such a good sale at the grocery store yesterday I had to buy one that I was planning for later this week!) and mashed potato dinner here. Yum! I am so glad to be feeling better...to enjoy this holiday, our beautiful service at church, and food glorious food once again, it's priceless!

We hope it was a happy, not so white, Easter for the rest of you!