Easter Week Observances

One of the things we tried this year during our Easter week observances was to host a Passover Seder.



Jeff read aloud about the Passover in Exodus 12, and a few New Testament scriptures (John 1:29b, 1 Corinthians 5:7, Ephesians 1:7, Hebrews 9:22, 1 Peter 1:18-20 just to name a few) that helped connect some of the dots for those present, namely that Jesus IS that spotless Passover lamb, and that by His shed blood we can have forgiveness of sins.



It was very meaningful, and something I think we'll repeat in the future.

Then, though it didn't have anything at all to do with the Passover, after the dinner, because everyone was already at our home, we broke out the stuff to dye Easter eggs.



Someone was very excited.






The ugly eggs barely showing on the bottom row were an experiment, hard-boiling the eggs in natural substances (tea bags and onion skins) together with vinegar to come up with other colors. They turned out kind of...interesting. Mostly rust brown and a natural brown egg color. Next time, I plan to research natural dye colors well ahead of time to have the desirable materials on hand for blue, green, red, gold and pink eggs.

Then early Easter morning, Judah and Jericho searched high and low for their Easter 'baskets'.

Here, Judah shimmied under the sofa because he spotted something yellow behind the curtains.



His hunch was correct.



Even though he had already 'found' the present in it the night before in my craft room, lol. (Little turkey even carried the truck out to us and asked, "Is dis my Easteow pwesent?")

Naturally, he was pretty excited to finally get to open it Easter morning.

Here, Jericho was getting 'warmer'. Please excuse the laundry on the sofa there (and all this time you thought I was kidding about piles of laundry on my sofa, didn't you, lol?).

Their old baskets didn't fit the bigger things daddy bought for himself them this Easter, so at the last minute we dug out these goofy turquoise and yellow round things I got from IKEA a couple of years ago. They worked great, even if they lack the traditional feel of baskets.

While the kids looked through their Easter goodies, we did a quick pickup on the house in preparation for Easter dinner in our home after the Cantata and service at Church.

We had a crowd coming and don't normally have picnic tables set up in our living room, lol.

We did break one of our annual traditions this year. *sigh*

We neglected to get a family photo of us all dressed up for Easter.

This was because dinner wasn't for a couple of hours after we got home, and trying to keep two boys in dress shirts with ties for that long is just not possible. Especially when it was a really warm day outside.

It was hard enough just trying to keep them free of grass stains and their shirttails all tucked in at church, what with the sugar rush their excitement and all the running around with their friends afterwards.

We did manage to get Judah in his dress shirt and tie earlier that morning, only because the tie was a gift and we wanted to send a picture in the thank you card.

"Do I wook shawp, mama?" Judah asked as I took the photo. "Yes...you look SHARP!" I replied.

Later that afternoon, the boys were allowed to get out their novelty 'Fossil Eggs' and play Archaeologist while they brushed and chiseled away the 'dirt' from the plastic 'bones'.

Very clever idea, I must say, but with having just heard about the bad drywall in the news that morning (not to mention other recent things like the melamine in baby formula and lead in toys), one has to wonder what kind of industrial slag comprised the unnatural gray-brown colored 'dirt' in those eggs, seeing as they were all from the same place.

We did make the boys wash thoroughly after working on their eggs, but I suspect Jeff would have thought it a little overboard if I'd made them put on respirators, lol.

Jericho very quietly and methodically removed all the 'bones' for his figurine, while Judah mercilessly jackhammered through his with his chisel. "Wookit, mama...I'm diggeen fo dinos!"



While they finished up, I went out back to check out our fig tree which I noticed from my kitchen window had finally budded.

I found cute little baby figs popping out all over the place. When we can finally start picking them, I'm going to make homemade Fig Newtons. Mmmmm.

Here are the emerging baby pomegranates. A brilliant red color.

And here are what I believe are Italian prune plums like my grandma used to have in her yard when I was a kid.

And finally, the almonds...which are full size now and have turned a greenish color.

Though I was unable to get a photo of it, our neighbors got a darling little baby goat. It was bleating for it's mother most of the day as it got used to roaming through a foreign yard, and Judah stood at the fence reporting on it's movements around their back yard. It spent most of the day up on the 'rocks' that comprise their Koi pond fountain, lol.

New life busting out all over the place.

I just LOVE this time of year!