Easter 2010

I know I should have blogged sooner about our Easter, but I've been busy getting ready for our family trip to Italy. But now that our flight has been canceled due to the volcanic ash coming from Iceland, I have a little time on my hands.

Anyway, Easter is always a fun time of year at the children's school. Every year, the school has some kind of contest; two years ago, it was egg decorating, last year was Easter bonnets. This year, the children had to make Easter gardens. I had never heard of this before, so I had to look up examples on-line. Basically, the kids get some kind of tin, fill it with soil, and put in all sorts of rocks, moss, sticks, shells, flowers... anything really, and make it look like a garden. Most children include an Easter theme with it, and include Jesus' tomb and the cross. Anyway, here are Tim and Maddie's Easter gardens (a little windblown, unfortunately).The school always has an Easter service as well, which I just love. The children do some readings and sing songs at the local church. Here are a few clips of them performing some Easter songs:





Every year on base, the youth services organization holds a base-wide Easter egg hunt for the children. There were easily 300 kids there this year, all crammed into the gym. The egg hunt is organized by age: each child is given a card with two stickers on it, and in their designated section, they have to find the plastic egg with those same two stickers. Tim and Maddie found theirs after a few minutes of looking and each received a goody-bag. Collin, on the other hand, had the most fun out of everyone. To him, the gym looked like a wide-open space covered with balls (the eggs) which he was delighted to throw and kick! He had a ball!The kids got to meet the Easter Bunny too. Collin was fascinated, Maddie was still afraid of him, and Tim was glad to indulge in the basket of free candy.Of course, no Easter would be complete without dying some eggs and making our traditional bunny cake! The kids opted for no coconut this year on the bunny cake, so instead, we decided to make him a funky blue color.We had a nice Easter morning. The kids were up before dawn of course, but waited to wake us up at 7am (as instructed!). How surprised I was to find them both already dressed for church at 7am. (I guess they had a lot of time to kill!) The kids all had fun looking for their eggs, and of course, eating them! At first, Collin was more motivated to play with his cars, but he quickly discovered that there were yummy things to eat inside those plastic eggs!After looking for the candy-filled eggs, the kids searched for Resurrection Eggs. I was so pleased with how much of the Easter story they knew this year. If you've never heard of Resurrection Eggs before, I highly recommend that you get some. It's a really great way to teach kids or reinforce the real Easter story.

We had a nice Easter breakfast that morning, followed by a lovely church service. Later that afternoon, we had Easter dinner at our friends Kelly and Dan's house. It was a very nice Easter for all of us!