Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday was a beautiful day. 

It was the perfect day to reflect on the resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Earlier in the week we found a package on our doorstep full of these cute, new outfits for the kids.  Perfect for Easter!  We have such sweet friends.

Gracie was especially excited about her new dress.  She loved it and wanted a million pictures taken of her. 

After church (and naps) we headed up to Granny and Grandpa’s house for Easter dinner. 

Tenley and Emma were nice enough to do several egg hunts for Isaac and Grace while they waited for dinner.  They loved it and wanted many more!

After our delicious dinner we went on an Easter Walk. 

Grace was especially intent on finding the objects that symbolized the different parts of the Easter story. 

It was such a nice day, we enjoyed being together. 

I know this picture is blurry, but I had to include it.  Isaac just loves his Grandpa Mike!

Tenley and Emma were a little crazy on our walk, well when aren’t they?  There may or may not have been some face-licking involved… 

Everybody contributed to the Easter Walk and Grace was so proud of the objects we found. 

Later that evening we celebrated Tenley’s 18th birthday.  I’m still having a hard time believing she’s 18.

She liked the blanket that Emma and I made for her. 

What a wonderful Easter it was!

Easter Bunny Saturday

As usual the Easter Bunny made his Easter deliveries on Saturday.

The hunt for baskets was on as soon as the kids got up.

There were smiles all around once those baskets were finally found!

Then the hunt for eggs started.  Grace could hardly contain her excitement and Isaac wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to get a picture of him.  I did catch him eating candy in the corner though. 

After all the fun was done we had what we affectionately called “bunny bums” for breakfast. 

I thought they were so cute!  So did everybody else.

It was a fun morning.

Dying Easter Eggs

A couple kids at our house were just a little excited to dye Easter eggs. 

We tried Kool-eggs this year by using Kool-Aid to dye our eggs.  The Kool-Aid made our kitchen smell heavenly and it made for some brightly colored eggs (although I didn’t think they dried as bright as they were when we first pulled them out of the color). 

We also made volcano eggs.  They turned out awesome and were so fun! 

The volcano eggs were so pretty.  We will definitely be doing that again next year!

Easter Activities

I love that we get to focus on the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ during the Easter season.  We really tried to center most of our Easter activities around the Savior. 

We had our annual Resurrection Eggs Family Home Evening the week before Easter.   Emma still loves this lesson and Isaac and Grace were so excited to see what was in each egg.  They know the story of the last week of Jesus’ life really well, and they just soaked up everything.

After the lesson we made resurrection rolls.  They are so yummy!

It is always cool to see that empty roll and think on the resurrection and what it means for each of us. 

The week before our Easter FHE, we planted wheat grass as a family to make our own Calvary’s Hill and empty tomb scene.  Isaac and Grace helped water it every day. 

The day before Easter we put the whole thing together.  For some reason the grass didn’t grow very well.  I’ve never had a problem with it before, but all the grass we grew this year was a little sad.  The wheat must be too old or bad or something, but it still turned out cool and the kids liked watching the grass grow and making a representation of the empty tomb. 

It made a nice centerpiece for our Easter festivities. 

Another activity that helped us remember the atonement, was a carnation experiment. 

We talked about how Jesus Christ took our sins upon him.  To illustrate that we dyed white carnations red.   Again, I didn’t do it quit right.  I’ve always done it before with one or two carnation per cup, but I was hoping the mini carnations we used would allow for several in one cup.  They turned red, but not as bright as they could be, and not all of them turned color.  It was still a good visual reminder and the kids loved to see them progress from red to white. 

Fighting Pirates

Isaac and Daddy became pirates for an afternoon. 

There was a lot of pirate fighting going on in our living room.

Sometimes Pirate Isaac was victorious…

…other times it was Pirate Daddy who was winning. 

They both look pretty fierce to me!

Good thing Isaac has a good Daddy to play such boy games with! 

General Conference Weekend

General Conference is a much anticipated event at our house.  We love to soak up the spirit of the talks and we like to have fun and eat good food as well.  We definitely talk General Conference up in the weeks leading up to the first weekend in April, so there is generally a lot of hype around it!  We had a General Conference FHE the Monday before, and it was cute to hear all that Isaac and Grace knew about it.  It is especially cute to hear them say the names of the members of the First Presidency.

We set up a projector in the playroom to watch Conference on this year.  Our Conference Tent turned into two separate tents which ended being a great idea.  Isaac and Grace stayed in their respective tents for the majority of the sessions they were awake for and they played and colored quietly in them.  They loved the connection to the people in the Book of Mormon who listened to King Benjamin in their tents, and we loved the quiet.  It was great!

This was the view I had of Emma through all four sessions.  She is such a good girl and took diligent notes.  I think she is starting to look forward to General Conference for more than just the cinnamon rolls for breakfast!

We hung up a picture of the General Authorities and encouraged Isaac and Grace to match the speaker to their picture. 

And of course we got the Conference Cups out again.  I was really worried that they would be distracting and that Isaac and Grace would be whining for candy the whole time, but they surprised us.  We gave them each a little bag of candy to munch on in their tents which kept them happy and they didn’t seem to notice that Emma was dipping into the buckets throughout the sessions.  Emma wrote the words on the buckets this year and she was very strategic about it.  She knew which words were said the most and she put those words on her favorite candies. 

On Sunday my family came down for our traditional Conference activities.  I’m pretty sure that Emma gets the good note-taking example from her awesome aunts.

Grace took a little bit of a break from her tent for some coloring with Daddy.

Between sessions we played Don’t Eat the General Authority while listening to this catchy tune (check it out, it’s pretty good!).  Tenley was a good sport to play several games with Isaac and Grace.

And more importantly we ate our yummy Conference Brunch.  We all look forward to Conference Casserole and Conference Crepes. 

We enjoyed the last session of General Conference together after we ate.  All of the talks were wonderful and timely, as usual.  A couple of our favorite talks were by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland and President Dieter F. Uchtdorf (to only name a few).  It was a spiritually uplifting and recharging weekend. 

We ended the weekend with a few laughs though.  I couldn’t let April Fool’s Day go by without a couple tricks.  It was pretty funny watching Isaac and Grace try to drink their “juice” at dinner that night.

Tenley and Emma were smart enough to notice it was Jello, but it still produced a good laugh. 

For dessert I sent Emma out to the food storage room to get the pan of brownies I made.  Ha, ha!  It was actually a pan of Brown E’s. 

Good thing we were all stuffed so it wasn’t too much of a disappointment!