Easter!

I'm finally returning back to my poor neglected blog to tell you about Easter! Wow, I'm behind. Time to catch up like crazy!

We dyed Easter eggs with our wonderful preschool friends. Candee was bold enough to volunteer her house for the egg-dropping, dye-splashing, adventure. Sam really loved dying the eggs but was dropping them in to the dye as fast as he could and there were lots of cracked eggs and lots of dye tsunamis. We probably had a world record for the fastest egg dying in history. I think it took us about 5 minutes to destroy, I mean dye, all 12 of our eggs. Well, 10. I destroyed two of them while dropping them in to the pan to boil them. I guess this lack of carefulness with Easter eggs may be genetic.

We didn't break this one!

Adam and Elsie showing off their eggs!

Alright, so I exaggerated. We only cracked a few of these. They look pretty good, don't they? I love dying Easter eggs.

Candee, L-A and I had fun dying the eggs after the kids got bored.

Candee - the supermom. Juggling two newborns? No problem.

On Saturday, Sam and I went to the Smiley Court Easter Egg Hunt while Don went on a long jog. At first Sam was wondering what was going on but after a couple minutes, he caught on and was a master egg finder.

Sam was nice enough to only take one egg and leave the rest for this little baby. What a good boy!

Sam and Elsie found a stash by the tree. They were super excited!

William, Adam, and Sam - loving the donuts.

As soon as we finished up at Smiley Court's egg hunt, we headed to the Calvary Bible Church where I go to my MOPs (Mothers of Preschoolers) group. I love MOPs and I loved this egg hunt. The kids each had to find one egg of each color and size and then they took them in to the church where a helper opened the eggs with them. Each egg had a different item that related to Christ's resurrection story. They glued each item into their Easter story. It was a really neat, Christ-centered activity. I loved it. 

I thought it was clever that they had the kids find each different color egg because it kept them from just furiously racing from place to place, taking as many eggs as they could hold. From an event planning perspective, this was an amazingly well coordinated egg hunt. I was amazed at how many hundreds of colored eggs they had stashed in bags in the bushes. 

Going through the Easter story.

After finishing the Easter story, they got to grab a handful of prizes from the treasure chest.  

The Jenkins, Parks, and Jacksons all came and we had a fun lunch together. Sam's favorite friend, Josh, sat next to Sammy; he was thrilled.

A sweet hug from Elsie.

I made a delicious pan roasted salmon with roasted tomatoes, and lemon chive potato salad. It was scrumptious and I was pleased with how pretty it was so I had to take a picture!

Easter morning, Sam woke up to yet another egg hunt at our house.

Sam gave daddy his Easter basket which was filled with Justin's almond and chocolate hazelnut butters and some Ferrero Rocher chocolates. 

And then the Conkey Easter egg hunt commenced. Sam found all the eggs and was super excited about opening them all and finding all the candy and quarters I'd hidden inside. 

Check out all that chocolate! We gave Sam a few pieces of chocolate and then took the rest to our classes at church.

After church, we had a delicious dinner and played "Bang" with Kelli and Evan and friends. It was a great way to finish out our wonderful Easter.

Kelli made my favorite cake in the world - her yogurt cake with mango mousse. It was amazing.

Evan and Don

Curtis, Rodney and Shauna, and Leah. 

Sam stacking and organizing his chocolate. He made this "model" of a city for us. He learned from Bob the Builder that you make a model before you build the real thing. Such a smartie.