Easter

For April Fools' Day this year we actually did a few mild pranks. We glued eyes on many of our fridge occupants, which the kids thought were great.

I also told them at dinner that I had made brownies for dessert (we never have dessert unless it's someone's birthday or we have guests for dinner). I pulled out a pan with some Es I had cut out of brown paper--Brown E's. To assuage their disappointment I told them they could have juice and pulled out cups full of red jello with a straw sticking out. Annie was not fooled, but Ryan tried sucking and sucking until he looked around and saw everyone else had pulled out their straw and was eating Jell-o off of it. They got a kick out of it. Their April Fools jokes were mostly along the lines of "What's that?!" and when we look they yell, "April Fools!"

The first weekend in April was General Conference and Easter. Since Rachel had the Friday before Easter off of school we decided to go do our Easter fun at Grandma's house then so we didn't have to try to cram everything between sessions of conference.

First we decorated eggs.

 Annie and McKenzie dyed just a few eggs, then spent most of the time putting these stickers on every inch of their 2 eggs.

 After they were decorated the Easter egg hunts began. They had such a fun time hiding and finding and finding some more.

 We wrapped up the fun with their Easter presents from Grandma. Grandma made these shirt-dresses for all the girls. They loved them.

 A big dogpile hug-fest with Grandma:

 After opening presents we headed to the theater to watch Cinderella. Ryan and Megan stayed with Grandpa so Megan could nap and Ryan could run around as much as he wanted without disturbing the whole theater full of movie watchers.

Easter morning the kids woke up to find their Easter baskets. Ryan immediately saw a package of gum in his basket and didn't care about anything else after that. We couldn't drag him back to look at the other things the Easter bunny had left for him.

 They got some Legos from us and spent a good portion of General Conference building with Legos, including helping build a temple. It's the first set of the small (choking hazard size) Legos that we own and they're long over due. The kids have been really enjoying building with them.

Our awesome neighbor, Shannon, has given the kids Easter baskets every year since we've lived here. This year she didn't get Megan a basket (for obvious reasons), but she did get her this singing duck that sings You Are My Sunshine and the little chicks dance around. Megan LOVES it.

 During General Conference, taking after President Uchtdorf, I guess, flying in their airplane:

 And Megan doing her General Conference thing (playing with whatever remote she can find).

It was a fabulous Easter/General Conference weekend. Since then Ryan has begun doing this dying thing where he'll lay down on the ground and say he's dead, then after I say how sad I am that he's dead, he starts wiggling, then he happily announces he's alive again. Occasionally when he says he's dead he tells me how someone rolled a big rock over him, so I'm pretty sure he's re-enacting the story of Jesus dying and getting resurrected. Happy Easter!