Easter treasures

Well, we are sad that Easter week has passed, it is one of our favorite times of the year around our house. We use this book and absolutely love it! I highly recommend it to everyone out there! My sister (super woman) gave it to us a couple of years ago and we have used it each year since. This book walks you through each day of Easter week, telling you what happened on each day in Christ's life, and gives you ideas of how to emphasize the goings on of that day for all different age ranges - kids, teens, whole family, etc. It also has family skits in it to do during the week, stories to read to go along with certain days, and a side-by-side daily readings section that has Matthew, Mark, Luke and John next to each other so you can read each apostles version of each story. It is a WONDERFUL addition to your library. My kids look forward to Easter week each year, and can tell you that on Monday Jesus cleansed the temple, and on Thursday he suffered in Gethsemane, and all sorts of the parables he taught throughout the week.

As far as the Easter bunny side of Easter goes, the kids had a great time with him also! We spent the day with our family up on the north side doing a big Easter get together. All of us moms brought eggs for an egg hunt and when they were all put together there were almost 650 eggs! Yikes! It was like an Easter Egg Hunt gone mad! Trying to hide that many eggs in one backyard was nearly impossible, some of the hiders just piled them up, and others just walked around tossing eggs anywhere! In past years we have done egg hunt where each child gets to find 12 eggs, but this year each kid was responsible for finding 49! We did do a spiritual egg hunt through the scriptures afterwards to try and pull the kids back into the real mood of Easter to find the real treasure of Easter, and that went pretty well. Watching the kids open all those eggs made us realize that next year, we might have to go back to coordinating with each other how many eggs we each bring! Here are some pictures from the so called hunt!

We told the kids that we had asked the Easter Bunny not to bring any candy since we are trying to live and eat healthier (and since they got so much candy yesterday, so this year the bunny brought them each a shirt, a box of Band-aids, a little ball, some sidewalk chalk, a yo-yo, and a couple other little cheesy toys (you've got to love the dollar section of stores!) They were thrilled with their baskets, and I loved not having candy in them. Oddly enough, the favorites from the baskets were the band-aids and the yo-yos! Teagan searched all over her body to find a scratch to put one of her new Littlest Pet Shop band-aids on, and Owen took his "old" band-aid off of his finger to put a new car band-aid one on. Go figure! Oh, and Owen got a new leash for his dogs since he lost his other one when we were in Georgia, so he was thrilled with that and put it on a dog right away! Now Chocolate Peanut Butter (the dog) can't run away from him anymore. (I didn't realize that was a problem, but according to him, it is!)
Today on the way to church, Teagan noticed how beautiful the sky was and how nice the weather was after all the cold and rain we have had lately, and she said she thinks that God did that on purpose just for today. He was so happy today that we were celebrating such a marvelous thing, that He couldn't help but make it a marvelous day. I thought that was a pretty neat thing for her to think up!

We hope all our blogging buddies and family had a wonderful Easter week and an amazing Easter.