An Easter Extravaganza

Today was a busy Easter day.  We started off in the morning before church with the kids getting their Easter baskets/  The each got a small toy.  Joshua's was a Nerf dart gun, which he loves.  It's similar to one I had at work years ago where it has a laser light to shine a red dot on your target (though it's wildly inaccurate) before shooting the suction cup dart at it.  I think we actually all really like playing with it.  All kids also got little scooters.

Meghan came up with great matching Easter outfits for the kids, which we dressed them up in for church.  I took some pictures of them inside.  We have a tree in our back yard that suddenly this year burst forth with white blossoms.  It might be a Bradford Pear tree, but I don't know.  But it's never done that before, so maybe it was finally mature enough this year to do it?  I'm not an arborist or whatever, so maybe that's not how it works.  Or maybe it's done that every year, but I don't think so.  Anyway, trees like this only blossom for about two weeks each year, so we were fortunate it was over Easter, so I was able to take some pictures of the kids in their nice outfits in front of the trees.  One of these is in the morning when it was a little too cold, and one was in the afternoon when it was a little too sunny.  They're both pretty good but not great pictures, but it's not for lack of trying.  I literally took 170 pictures in an effort to get a great one of them in front of the pretty tree.

We had lunch and then I hid the eggs.  We have a color-coded system, so each kid only searches for and picks up the eggs of their assigned color.  That allows me to apply different levels of difficulty so it's not too easy but not too hard for each kid, based on their age.

After naps, we went over to Mom and Ron's house to have a family Easter celebration as well as to celebrate Grandma Hall's 84th birthday.  I told Joshua last night that we were going to go to Grandma and Grandpa's house to celebrate Easter and to celebrate GG's birthday, and he said, "We're gonna have two celebrates!"  And that's exactly what we did with our double celebration,

The cousins got to open their Easter baskets from Grandpa Ron and Grandma Peg, and they were excited about their cute and soft stuffed bunnies.

It was a busy and eventful day, but it was a really nice day.  Easter is always a wonderful holiday because of what it represents in Christ's resurrection, and to add some nice family time, both regular and extended, to it made it all that much better.