Happy Easter!

Happy Easter! We've enjoyed a fun day at Mama and Papa's house this year. A friend had told us about an idea she'd seen somewhere to roll hot (just boiled) eggs in crayon shavings before you color them. So we tried that this year. This morning we shredded some old crayons that Mama had from when my brother and I were growing up, and boiled some eggs. The girls had great fun rolling the eggs in the crayon shavings. We discovered that different brands of (really old) crayons definitely melt differently. Some melted completely, covering the part of the egg that had been rolled in them with a smooth wax coating. Others stayed more little bumpy  blobs. But both looked pretty cool.  After we did that we needed to let the eggs cool before we could color them. So we had a yummy waffle breakfast. My grandparents came up for that, so MiniMe and Sassy showed Grandma their eggs-in-progress.

After breakfast, and cleaning up, the eggs were cool so then we added normal egg color to them. We discovered that it takes longer for the color to "stick" for some reason, but eventually they took the color nicely where the wax wasn't.

Little Bit and Mama worked together to color a couple eggs while the big girls were coloring the rest.  She had great fun with it. She still generally chooses to sleep sans clothes, and this morning I decided that was just as well since first we had waffles with all kinds of yummy, stain-y things like blueberries and strawberries. And then for egg coloring, I was definitely glad we'd opted for the nature baby look. I think she got more color on HER than she did on the eggs. But she had a blast.

Here's a picture of her hands when she was through (her legs were almost as bad).

And the final result. Three happy girls and their masterpieces. 

Once the eggs were all decorated, Mama pulled out the Easter baskets, err buckets. Little Bit wasn't real sure what to expect when Mama told her we were getting "Easter baskets" but she figured it out pretty quickly, hee hee.

One of the things they all got in their easter buckets was a lollipop, so here are the three musketeers sitting on the hearth eating their lollipops!

After all of that we took a break in the festivities so Little Bit could take a nap. Once she woke up, we jumped back into the fun with an Easter egg hunt. We encouraged the big girls to leave the most obvious ones so that Little Bit could find some. But I think other than moving slower than her sisters, she held her own just fine. 

She had a BLAST too. After our "official" egg hunt, we had to divide up the "loot". To avoid the competition that is such an issue between Sassy and MiniMe, we've always had the rule for egg hunts, that they all have fun finding the eggs and then once we're all done, we bring them all in and dump them in a pile and divy up the loot equally. Avoids, or at least lessens the "BUT I SAW IT FIRST" squabbles. And then it was time to fix lunch.  Which, of course, included pasta salad (with boiled eggs in it).

After lunch, we did several more egg hunts for Little Bit using the plastic eggs and hiding them over and over again. The big girls got into the fun of hiding them so they weren't left out either.

And that was our Easter celebration this year.

Lest you think we completely ignored the religious aspect of Easter. We've been working on that for the past week or so.  I finally remembered and made a set of Resurrection Eggs this year (something I've wanted to do for the last 3 or 4 years, but never remembered in time to pull all the pieces together or order a pre-made set). I even happened upon some Easter stickers when I was cleaning one of the bookshelves in the dining room a couple weeks ago, so I could decorate the egg carton too. We started 12 days ago opening one egg per day, so that today (and empty egg, naturally, to represent the empty tomb) was our final egg.

I also got a nice selection of Easter books (that tell the Bible story in a variety of ways) from the library a couple weeks ago, and we enjoyed reading one or two of them per day while we were home.

The same ebook I found the list of Easter books to look for at the library also recommended the Matthew video as a good Easter video. I knew my parents had the VHS version, so figured we could watch it at their house.  So we've watched the first part of it, and will be watching some more this evening.