This Year's Easter

Each Christmas Brandon and I wake up early so we can see the kids come barrelling out of the hallway with surprised looks. And each Christmas we wait...and wait...and after an hour of waiting we try to make a lot of noise so the kids will hear, and it never works.

We were hoping the same would happen this Easter, so we slept in. And wouldn't you know they were in our room at 6am begging us to get up and see what the Easter Bunny left.

There were window clings to let us know he had been here.

Do you have an Easter basket tradition? Brandon's family has always hidden baskets so a lot of the fun is searching for yours. That wasn't a tradition in our home growing up, but it's super fun so we've adopted it for our little family.

These are precious, primarily because of Brandon's Easter enthusiasm in the background.



The Easter Bunny even went to McDonald's and scouted out a MyLittlePony Khera's been wanting for a while.

She loved her dresses.


Tommy loved his peeps.


We changed his shirt about 27 times that day and finished a bottle of Shout treating all of the candy drool, ketchup and jello stains.  Teething and candy are not a good combo.


The girls tore open one of GJ's famous brown paper packages.


Khera's Zhu-Zhu pet nibbled through most of the presents, they were thrilled to be reunited.


Elle's was the only one not pilfered.


Here is Tommy with his Peter Pan book, one of Daddy's childhood favorites.

I love it when he plops himself down in my lap with a book and shouts "REE!"

We're still waiting for Elle to take off her jewelry.

She is looking SO old to me...

Khera had to immediately call GJ and say "Thank You", she's so thoughtful like that. She even dialed the number herself.


Part of the reason I started this blog was to be able to look back at our lives when the kids were young. I scoured my portable hard drive looking for pictures from past Easters, and I remembered about a year ago I made a horrible error and DELETED.OVER.A.YEAR'S.WORTH.OF.PHOTOS! (record stops) You got it, all the birthday, Christmas, Easter, summer photos--GONE FOREVER. Excuse me while I try to avoid hyper-ventilating.
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OK. It can always be worse, right? Well, some still remain in my memory, but after having 3 kids, those memories are very foggy. My remote hard drive Grandma is not available to see if she backed me up on 2007-2010 Easters (she knows what a ditz I am), I guess that will have to wait until next year.

Since we were up at the crack of dawn we decided to hit up the 8 o'clock mass.  Got the kids ready, packed up bribery items, loaded everyone in the car and headed over to church...and...there was no 8 o'clock mass because there was a sunrise service.  We went for a drive, and all the while the girls whined that they didn't want us to get lost, so we went home. I have no idea where this fear of getting lost is coming from??? We headed back at 9:30am and as usual it was standing room only. Anyway, I managed to get a couple shots of the girls, but Tommy did not cooperate.

Khera's the queen of goofy grins.



We did not absorb much of the homily at mass because we were busy herding the kids around the lobby, to and from the water fountain, bathroom, out to the courtyard, etc. I can't wait to be able to listen again, it has been SO LONG, and I really need to hear those words every week to set me straight and give me focus.

Ms. Moore, Khera's teacher, sent this cute Easter poem home last week and we thought we'd share it.


Tommy's birthday fell on Easter this year. So stay tuned for 2nd Birthday post with a recount of his 1st birthday. I hope you all enjoyed time with loved ones this Easter holiday.