Easter Baskets

Easter Sunday is here again, and it came early of course as we all were getting props for the service in the main sanctuary, dressing up, and getting all kinds of gifts and baskets to come along with us for church.  It's a big day today, Resurrection Sunday, and we were off to church for a few services where we sang worship songs and listened together as a family as Pastor Lance read to us all from the Bible. 

It was a long morning, especially when following the big day we had yesterday at church.  Nevertheless, Daddy was out there in the bunny costume again, posing with kids in the Easter Bunny throne area that was built for the event yesterday.  There were a lot of pictures taken of Daddy with kids this morning, although of course it wasn't Daddy:  it was the Easter Bunny.  And the kids love the Easter Bunny, giving him hugs and kisses and delighted smiles.  Fun morning!

At home, here was the Easter basket left in the kitchen for Madison.  It had a "Trolls" theme to it, complete with the movie, of course.  But as you can see, it is filled with all kinds of other "Trolls" items, most of which have something to do with candy.  There was a clearance sale at Joanne's a month or so ago, and we thought it would make a great basket theme!

Afterwards, we went over to Aunt Shain's for dinner with the rest of the family, and it was a nice time.  We hid eggs in the front yard, so Madison and her three cousins could go looking for color-coded eggs.  Madison was after the pink ones:

The weather outside was almost like summer, or at least late spring.  Which isn't terribly far off, I suppose.  Anyway, it was nearly just plain hot.  We were out there looking for the eggs, each kid looking for exactly twenty.  And it took a while to find those last lingering eggs, but every single one was found!

We had some desert after that - Mommy made this excellent carrot cake.  We also exchanged baskets, which in our family is a time-honored tradition.  Seriously, we go through a lot of effort for each of these baskets, and some of them came out really great.  Here's just a few of them.  We'll start with the one that we made for Hannah.

It's a No-Face themed basket.  He's a character from "Spirited Away."  Daddy made that egg on Tuesday, and we ordered the plush No-Face online, also adding plenty of black jelly beans to the basket.  Mommy thinks they look like susuwatari, those little football creatures in the movie.  

Here's another basket that we've been collecting stuff for since October.  It's a "Grumpy Cat" themed basket!

Mommy did a fantastic job with this one.  Obviously there's the egg from Tuesday, but look at all the other stuff in there.  There's even a Little Golden Book in there as well!  Mommy cut out the best Easter-related Grumpy Cat memes, and made a bit of wallpaper around the edges.  

Here's the basket that Aunt Shain made for Mommy and Daddy:

Imagine if some of the servants in Beast's castle got the less glamorous enchantments.  You can see above in "Beast's Other Servants" how one was apparently turned to a garbage can, which she used as a basket.  Inside there was animated toilet paper, diaper rash ointment, corn cushions, and more.  There was candy at the bottom of this basket, but apparently you'll have to fight all these ornery servants to get to it!

We made one basket for the boys, and it had a Wonder Woman theme.  This was because we got them some Amazon gift cards, writing on the back that they were from "the Amazonians."

Madison got some nice baskets as well, collecting about five more new Tsum-tsums today, one of the rabbit Thumper, and four other ones from the movie "Moana."  She already has them up in bed with her.

We got home, and Madison wanted to watch a few episodes of "Mighty Med," after her piano practice, of course.  Mommy took a bath, and Daddy was catching up on the blog here.  We read some more from the last of the young Jack Sparrow books, "Bold New Horizons," and also from the Neverland devotional - just one day left in that one.

And then we said our prayers.  It's an early night tonight, because tomorrow we have Milestones testing.  It's a big deal around here, and we're glad Madison is healthy enough to take the tests this year.  Last year, she was sick the whole week and had to make it up later.  Still, she did great.  And we think she'll do great tomorrow.  We're very proud of her!