I started to find t-shirts to decorate for the kids, but if they weren't going to wear them to school, what was the point? The kids reminded me of a tradition I didn't know we had...that of making shamrocks from bread stick dough. I picked up some cans of dough from the grocery store and found a very old container of green sugar. See? Everyone was happy enough!
 |
| Bread stick Shamrocks |
April Fool's Day came next to our home. It was a little more of the same holiday apathy that nearly killed this celebration as well. Plus, it's hard to get really naughty on Sunday...it just didn't feel right.
We did switch the kids' blankets after they'd fallen asleep. Daniel nearly ruined the whole thing when he woke up before we went to bed to mention that his blanket was missing and he didn't like the one he had. Party Pooper! The kids were pretty confused when they woke up. They had forgotten about April Fool's Day.
We also tried to "get" them by putting some lemon extract on their toothbrushes. In fear of over-doing it, I didn't put enough on. They didn't even notice, but knew something was up because Chad asked them if they'd noticed anything when they brushed their teeth.
I snuck up before bedtime and made sure they'd notice the second time. They were all probably wondering why we were suddenly so bossy about them brushing their teeth! (See? We're not perfect parents; we willingly avoid the toothbrush fight sometimes.)
The most recent holiday to celebrate was Easter! I bought 5 dz eggs to color.
We ended up with quite a colorful assortment of eggs. Chad and I got a little silly near the end of the decorating. Can you find a watermelon, football and strawberry?
A not-so-funny story happened while I boiling eggs. If you don't already know the details, I won't bore you with them now. But I have to show you the eggs we colored for the kind persons who delivered additional eggs to give us more to color again. I let them know that these eggs were from our chickens and were NOT boiled. Can you imagine what an unpleasant surprise that would be? I thought the brown eggs looked kind of neat in a "natural" sort of way.
The egg coloring was in the morning and the egg hunt was that afternoon. We had a little Easter Bunny hide the eggs. This was not the bunny, but I think she looks qualified for the job!
The Easter baskets were handed out, the contents examined, and the hunt began.
The nice thing about a big yard, is that there are endless hiding places.
Some of them were camouflaged...
...some of them were a little easier to find.
Everyone had a chance to fill their baskets with eggs because we had 102 eggs hidden. At the end of the hunt we were short 6 eggs. We kept going back out. The last two were a little tricky, but we felt silly when we finally found them. :)
Stripes could smell some of the eggs better than others because of the large cracks a few of them had. She would have had a snack if we'd let her!
Because of an idea I'd seen on Pinterest, we filled some plastic eggs with glow sticks and got the kids out of bed for one last hunt. They were a little confused at first, but it was fun to see a bright color shining out of a dark corner. Some of the glow sticks didn't light up very well and some of the eggs had to be taped shut, but it was still a lot of fun. I took this picture with a night feature on the camera.
A little while back we started celebrating the fun part of Easter on Saturday and left Sunday for church and lessons centered on the Easter Story. I made matching skirts for the girls and we snapped a few pictures before church. It was a little bit of a challenge to avoid the ugliest parts of the yard since nothing was really blooming yet!
We enjoyed some nearly perfect Easter weather this year, including walking home for the last stretch of road. Ahh...country living!
You still did more for the holidays you didn't celebrate than I did for them. I'm a big old party pooper when it comes to holidays. Did the kids like the glow-in-the-dark eggs? I saw those, too, and thought they looked fun.
ReplyDelete