Easter Recap

Jack was wondering if you all could just pretend I posted this two weeks ago… you can’t say ‘no’ to those eyes, can you?

We have been to Lansing three out of the last five weekends, it’s been great after not being there since Christmas, but it makes for busy weeks. Easter was the middle one of these trips and my boys were just as excited about this as any other trip, Jack squeals with great excitement, “We’re going to Lansing! Go see umpa [grandpa], Unca Mike and Candy [cousin Andy]!” That boy loves my dad, my brother and my nephew – I find it quite adorable!

Simon had Friday off so we got to make the trip all together after Liam got done with preschool on Good Friday – it was a nice treat as Simon often drives separately or we wait until Saturday to go but instead we got three days of 4-on-2 adult-to-child time, lovely!

Saturday I had lunch with a girlfriend from college, Amy, and it was such a nice treat to hang out and chat without kiddos running around. We caught up on life and covered depressing subjects like feeling lucky our group of friends hadn’t yet been hit by a horrible tragedy but also knowing that odds were one of us was going to have to deal with something like death of a spouse/child or breast cancer. It’s morbid, true, but I’m so glad to have friends that I can talk about this kind of stuff with and I think that having kids makes you think about these things and what you would do if the worst things happened. (Also reminds me that we need to get a will put together.)

Anywho… back to happy thoughts… I was torn about how to deal with Easter, Jesus’ resurrection and the Easter bunny. Leading up to Easter we read religious books about the real reason for Easter and talked about what it means that Jesus died on the cross and then came back to life and now lives in heaven with God so I felt like I covered what was important. And Easter morning, Easter baskets appeared but we didn’t really say that the Easter bunny brought them, but we also didn’t say where they came from. I’m sure we’ll field more questions in coming years but this year we just played it real low-key.

After church we geared up for a fun afternoon over at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, starting with a massive egg hunt in the back yard. We had 5 kids and about 150 eggs to chances were pretty good they were going to hit the jackpot.

We attempted to take an Easter photo of the boys, that did not work as there was now candy in the picture and nothing we could say could divert them from their mission of finding more eggs and eating the contents (bunny-shaped marshmallows were the biggest hit). Also worth noting, my kids had super-traditional snake and turtle plush easter baskets; what can I say, the pickin’s are slim when you shop the Target after-holiday clearance shelves.

While the rest of us sat down to a glorious meal, I knew it was useless to try to get Jack to eat anything, he’s fairly picky on an average day but knowing there was candy present meant there was really no way he was going to eat regular food. Fighting over food is not a battle I choose to go with, I know he gets the right nutrition on most days, but one day a year I will let him eat candy and call it good. And eat candy he did. Simon found him in the living room, sitting in the ottoman and chowing down on jelly beans.

After lunch, I think it was safe to say the kids were a little riled up and Jack and Max played an apparently highly entertaining game of sliding the screen door open and closed while laughing at the person on the other side. It was so sweet to see them interacting with each other, I could have watched this all day.

Isn’t the cuteness just too much?

After all that laughter, they were wiped out and had to take a little break. I’d say any day that ends with you chilled out on the ground with a full tummy is a good day (passed out on the ground is an entirely different story, if this happens to you then you might have a problem).

Happy belated Easter everyone!