Easter Weekend & General Conference

When Easter and General Conference fall on the same weekend it just makes them both more special.  But it’s also hard to fit in all the traditions we have for each of them! We managed and it made for a wonderful weekend.

As usual the Easter Bunny came on Saturday morning.  The hunt for baskets and eggs was on pretty early that morning.  Isaac and Grace were so excited to find Bibles in their baskets.

Emma may have needed a little help to find her basket.  Ha!

After the baskets were found, the eggs were collected.

The Easter Bunny was nice to the kids!

Grace had worked on sewing a Lego bag for Isaac for Easter. 

He loved it!

We got all the Easter Bunny Saturday stuff wrapped up in time to watch General Conference.

The Elders watched the first Saturday session with us.

It worked out best this year to switch our normal General Conference activities around a little.  Granny & Grandpa and my sisters came on Saturday instead of Sunday for our traditional brunch.  Yum, it was just as good on Saturday!  Isaac & Grace got a few Easter egg hunts that afternoon.  They were even outside since we were having gorgeous weather!

Lee and Dad went to the Priesthood session together, then those of who were left behind walked to Yogurt Shack for dinner.

It was such a beautiful weekend!

The place where we usually cut off the logging trail and head to Yogurt Shack was blocked off.  Probably for good reason, but we worked ourselves around the barrier anyway. 

Yum! 

On Easter Sunday we finished our study and discussion of Easter Week as we ate cinnamon rolls for breakfast (that we usually eat on Saturday!). 

After that we watched the beautiful Music and the Spoken Word Easter program. 

And then settled in for the last sessions of General Conference.  It was so good!

Between sessions we went on our Easter Walk.  We found some perfect treasures to remind us of the Easter story.

It’s a good thing we went on a couple walks that weekend, because man did we eat a lot!

That night we went to Grandma Dorothy’s house for a delicious Easter dinner.  We also celebrated Tenley’s birthday.

See, we ate a lot!

It was such a great weekend.  It was full of good stuff and I came away uplifted and with more hope and joy because of the Easter miracle.  It was also the end of such a very good Easter week.

Easter Week 2015

I love Easter.  We try really hard to focus our Easter celebrations mostly around the Savior.  This year I wanted to try even harder to focus each day on what was happening that day during the last week of His life.  There are so many resources in The Friend and the New Era, and we watched a Bible Video each day.  It helped to bring the spirit into our Holy Week. I don’t have pictures of everything, since some days we just discussed, read scriptures, looked at pictures, and watched videos.  But here are some that I do have pictures of.  On Monday Jesus visited the temple, so that’s what we did too. 

It was perfect because there wasn’t school that day.  We went in the morning so Lee could go with us.  Tenley also met us there on her way home from school.

Isaac insisted on taking his Book of Mormon to the temple.  At first I discouraged him from taking it thinking it would just be one more thing to carry, but in the end I let him. 

I am so glad I did, it was so sweet to watch him read the scriptures on the temple grounds!

Grace kept asking me to let her take pictures of the temple.

She got some good shots!

It was so nice to enjoy the spirit on the grounds as a family.

I hope our children love going to the temple.

After walking around we went to the visitors center. 

We had scheduled a viewing of Meet the Mormons.  The kids hadn’t seen it yet and they loved it.  I’m hoping we can always go to the temple on the Monday of Easter week.

Later that day the twins and I made salt dough eggs.  We painted and decorated them.

They turned out so cute and I strung them on ribbon for a garland…that I never hung up.  Sigh.

That night we had bunny bums for dinner.  Not very spiritual, but still a tradition!

After discussing what Jesus did on Tuesday, we dyed Easter eggs.

Thursday was the Last Supper.  We had our own Jerusalem feast and ate some of the same food Jesus would have eaten. 

The kids loved this and it will definitely be a new tradition for us.

We made resurrection rolls for dessert.

It’s always fun to open the empty rolls!

The Bible Videos were so helpful in talking about what happened on Friday and Saturday.  I am so glad we did this because it was an extremely busy week.  Having it all planned out and making it a priority was crucial to focusing our celebrating in the right place.