Celebrating Easter

It was a beautiful.. er, rainy, windy, hailing eater weekend.. beautiful easter egg hunt weather, not that that stopped any of us Oregonians. As always we work to make it a fun weekend for the kids, full of Easter traditions.

This year the celebration began for Little Calvin of Thursday as he is now old enough to begin having sleep-overs with his friends. For the parents, this is wonderous news. Their child gets to be gone for an evening giving them some precious alone time. But for the receiving parents, this can make for an interesting night of trying to get someone else's child to sleep. For him and his friend Chandler, this meant getting into bed at 9:30 PM, but not actually going to sleep until midnight. And for me... it meant discovering supposedly sleeping kids under the bed giggling, jumping ON the bed, and essentially adding to my already large crop of grey hairs. But soon, midnight finally hit, all kids were out cold and frazzled Dad got to go to sleep.

Friday, I had the afternoon off so I met the crew in town to watch Ice Age 2 (boys giggled throughout). On Saturday, I helped cook pancake for the church easter egg hunt and pancake breakfast. Then we had to get the house cleaned, as every parent knows that the "Easter Bunny doesn't visit dirty houses!"

Saturday evening we dyed our Eater Eggs in preparation for hiding by the big rabbit. In most homes, Easter Eggs are colored in nice bright colors. In my house, they are covered in Star Wars characters. Only I have the luxury of having a Darth Vader easter eggs. We did have a slight dilema. Little Calvin wanted to use every last egg decoration. That meant that eggs collected previously at the church would be redecorated to match the others. But could we in good conscience cover the "I love Jesus" themed easter egg with Darth Vader? We finally had to compromise and only cover that egg with the "good guy" characters...

The Big Bunny did come on Sunday, hiding eggs, candy and a soccer ball in the house. But what got us into trouble was the "after church conversation" about the true meaning of Easter that we attempted to have before finding eggs.

"Now remember... Easter is not really about bunnies and presents. It's a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus."

He replies "What does resurrection mean?"

"The resurrection is when Jesus came back to life after he dies on the cross."

Then he stops, thinks, and his eyes get all big..

"Wait! You mean Jesus is a ZOMBIE?!"

This then brought on a big discussion on the definition of zombies vs. resurrected beings.. all trying to communicate with a 5-year old. Good ol Little Calvin!

So Happy Easter All! Here is our "Happy Easter" photo collection featuring photos from throughout the weekend! Click to enjoy!