Easter came so early this year! It awlays amazes me how we cannot have Santa and Christmas trees in school, and yet both Christmas and Easter are tied to the two pagen rituals of the Winter and Spring solstice! But I digress. It turns out that Easter is determined by the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring solstice....and this year is the absolute earliest Easter can ever be! And it won't be this early again for 200 years. Good thing, don't want to be caught off guard again, ha ha!
So, on Friday I hopped (get it, hopped?) into the car and started the never-gets-shorter-no-matter-how-much-you-drive-it 6 hour drive down to Jacksonville, NC. It was a beautifully sunny, albiet chilly day, so no top down. It got to C2E2 around 3pm and we had a great afternoon of fun in the backyard. Erin of course wanted a picnic, so we had carrots, grapes and hummus in the backyard while playing "Funny Bunny". Erin's actually pretty good, and can count very well! Time got away with us (as usual) and so we didn't get to have pizza and movie night, we just got to have pizza night, and then bathtime and storytime and then we went outside to check out the full moon. It was beautiful.
Saturday morning arrived early, and with the "coc-a-doodle-doo" of E2 waking Nene up at 8am. Guess vacation is over! We had a very full day planned, complete with yummy crepes made by Christopher, and then Erik wanted to ride his bike, but Nene didn't bring hers, so I ran with Erin in the stroller while Erik rode his bike. We did this for 30 minutes, or until Nene's arms were about to fall off. But it was fun. Then we "practiced" hiding and finding easter eggs for the better part of the afternoon. Finally we realized we had tons of things to do and were running out of time!
First, Grandma sent the kids an Easter gingerbread house, so we had fun decorating that, despite Mommy's efforts at breaking all the little furniture I'd made for the gingerbread backyard....
And no Easter is ever complete without the Easter Bunny cake! This is a great idea my sister found years ago, and we've been making it ever since. This year Erik and Erin got to do some of the creative design, and it turned out very well.
Then it was easter egg dying time. Holy Cow! We boiled 7 dozen eggs and Erik and Erin had half of them dyed in about 2 minutes flat!!! So much for thinking this would take a long time......but then they decided that they needed to redye the eggs, and by the end we had a few that were a bit too brown, but overall, the eggs were very pretty and I'm sure the Easter Bunny (or Beagle) was very pleased with what we had to offer.
The kids had just seen Swiss Family Robinson for the first time a few weeks ago, and absolutely had to share that movie with Nene--it's the best movie ever! With Tigers, and snakes, and pirates, ARRRRRR!!!!!
We still had cookies to decorate, and cornish game hens to grill. Oh, where was the time going!?!
Finally got the kids to bed, and then we really had to get down to work. The Easter Bunny had over 84 hard-boiled eggs and 100 plastic eggs to stuff and hide. Not to mention Easter baskets! It was another late night for all.
Easter morning arrived again with the rooster at 8am and then a frenzy of "I see one" or "there's an egg", "oooo jelly beans!!!". Baskets were found quickly, and were quickly overflowing with eggs.
The suprise of the morning came when Erin found a very pretty egg down by Noah's Ark and went to pick it up, but her grip was a bit tight and she cracked the egg. That's when we discovered that in fact we had not hard-boiled 84 eggs. There were apparently a few that we only soft-boiled, or barely boiled at all.......
Let's just say we pretty much lost our appetites after a few egg fights at the breakfast table and the eggs looked more like the Cadberry's than something on a Cobb salad.
We spent the rest of the morning hiding and rehiding and rehiding easter eggs until it was time for Nene to go.
As always, the visits are too few and too short, but it was so great to spend Easter with everyone!
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