A New Mexico Easter

Here we are in our new Easter outfits.  

I swear I look like I am in pain, but I believe it was just the sun hitting my eyes.  Or maybe I'm just getting old and it shows more when I smile. But I wanted to show my whole dress.  All of that is embroidery!  It comes from a new website that I was introduced to by a friend called eshakti.  They customize your dress for you.  You can change the neck, the sleeves, the length and give them your measurements and they make the dress for you.  Super excited about it!

We had a super low key Easter, but a nice one.  One where we laughed together and enjoyed each others company.  

I taught my class and did the eggs with objects in each one that represent the story of Christ's last time on the earth.  I have changed it a little to focus on the things I think should be focused on more.

My version:

1. Matt 26:26-28 (sacrament cup)  This is the Last supper and the institution of the sacrament

2. Matt 26:14-15 (3 pennies wrapped in tin foil) The 30 pieces of silver

3. Matt 26:36-45 (Olive oil) representing the Garden of Gethesemane

4. Matt 27:1-2 (rope) Jesus is bound

5. Matt 27:18-24 (soap) Pilate washes his hands

6. Matt 27:35 (dice) casting lots

7. Matt 27:50-54 (rocks) the earthquakes, ending with the soldiers believing that Jesus was the son of God

8. Matt 27:57-60 (white linen) burial

9. Matt 27:62-66 (large rock) stone sealed on tomb

10. Mark 16:1 (cloves) to anoint the body

11. John 20:2-9 (small roll of gauze) seeing the empty tomb 

12. Matt 28:6 (empty) he is not here but is risen

I would like to tweak it a little more and put in the part about Mary seeing Jesus.  More than anything I wanted to focus on the fact that he had risen and not so much about the death.  The death is in there, but it's not the main focus.  

What I found was 1. 8 year olds, even my smartie pants kids, have trouble reading long scriptures.

2. They don't understand how scriptures are laid out or are written down on a paper.  They kept saying Matt- what does Matt mean?  I had to tell them more than a couple times that Matt was short for Matthew.  Then they would say 26 dot dot 26 dash 28.  3. They really can't find scriptures.  I had to go around showing them every single time, even though we stayed in the same 2 chapters most of the time.  I had to say, "don't turn your page, don't turn your page.  Stay where you are" almost every single time and then come around and point to the right verse.  So that took our whole lesson!  But at least we talked of Christ and the real reason for Easter AND we learned a little about how to find scriptures!

Easter

I have to admit, Easter was almost forgotten- what with my parents visiting and Sam's busy week ahead.  I remembered in time, though and we eeked in a few traditions- all which seem to be close to the end.  Samuel didn't participate at all in the egg coloring and Joseph did his two and quickly went back to his games.  Only Max stayed and colored eggs until they were all done.

There were only 12, so it didn't take long.  The next morning they quickly looked at their baskets before heading out the door to church.  I was sure we would get plenty of Easter at church.  Nope.  Sometime church just plugs on ahead with their schedule despite the holidays.  I really hate that.  Some years I wonder how a visitor would take our talks on Easter and Christmas.  I think mostly they would think we weren't Christian!  I can't even remember what the talks were about- Priesthood, Family history, the reason for the Book of Mormon- something like that.  Next year I have to not get so distracted and make sure we have a little more Christ in our celebrations, because I can't always rely on other people to make sure it happens for me!  We did at least have our traditional meal of ham (what is ham on Easter all about?) and the strawberry cake with lemon icing that I came up with years ago.  Yummy!

And on my new Italian pottery too!

Next year- we'll do better! Fingers crossed!

Addendum to Easter

We had the missionaries over for dinner the next day and they helped us color Easter Eggs.

One of them hadn't colored them since he was 12 and the other one had never colored eggs- ever!  His family tradition was to clean out the Grandparents swimming pool the day before Easter.  Great fun!!  I'm glad we got to share a tradition with them!

The Lame Mother excuse Blog

With our big trip to Rome, the start of track and normal living, it was hard to do everything we usually do for Easter.  The commissary and Bx ran out of Easter candy along time ago and never reordered.  I had grabbed a bunch of little peanut butter eggs when I saw them, but Joseph slowly ate those away, until I only had one bag left.  I re-hid those, but he found them before Easter as well.  Hence, Joseph got zero peanut butter eggs.  The rest of those that were left were split between the rest of us.  They don't do peanut butter in Europe still.  In fact that and Root beer is what you give a German to say thank you.  When they came to the American school as part of an exchange program, they all went out and got American money and insisted on going to Taco Bell and then over to the shoppette to get peanut butter cups.  Emma said it was really funny to see them all showing off their foreign money and getting all excited about Taco bell and peanut butter cups!
In the end we had to drive on Saturday, after the base Easter Egg hunt

(Friday was Good Friday and so everything was closed!) to the Real and picking up a bunch of yummy Germany Easter candy- which all happened to be made by Lindt!  I didn't get anything else, but had enough stuff in my "birthday box" to give the kids a little gift, also- a flying helicopter for all the boys (but we are out of batteries, whoops!) and some light up balloons for Emma (along with a shirt that she found that I liked and so stole from her!)

I didn't have time to make rolls, by the time we got home, so we didn't have our traditional cinnamon rolls for breakfast.  We made do with some good German bread for dinner.  Forgot about a jello salad, too!  We also never colored the eggs, but I needed them to make deviled eggs.  Oh well.  The dinner turned out fine, though and then we had a nice long walk.

 By the time we made it home it was past 8 pm and we needed to get everyone to bed.  No coloring of Easter eggs happened!  There was one bright spot.  We have been watching conference talks for our scripture reading lately and the one we were on, just happened to be about Jesus and the atonement.  It capped the day off nicely.
No one seemed too put out about the lack of Easter traditions happening, except the coloring of eggs.  We have the missionaries over tonight, so maybe we will do that with them.  Max said, "but it's after Easter, now."  Hey, we are making our own rules here, so we can color eggs whenever we want!

Easter Market in Maulbronn

Friday we worked at the Patch Bazaar with the scouts, but Saturday, we dropped our scouts off to work and then headed to Maulbronn to check out their Easter Market.  It was held in an amazing Kloster.

Rob saw this sign and read it Bez-erker Kloster and decided it was where the Berzerk nuns worked.

Of course it really means visitors to the Kloster. But when we were looking at the buildings one of the handles popped up and made a bang and we decided it must be some bezerk-er nuns coming to tell us to go away!    

Right before you get into the kloster there is this beautiful graveyard terraced onto the hillside.

It takes up about 3 terraces and then the rest is terraced with a vineyard.  Gorgeous!

Festive Fountain in the middle of the square.

The room wasn't very big that they had the Easter Market in, but for a tiny space, it seemed to hold a whole lot of amazing artists!

We saw eggs of every variation and all beautiful.  We saw some eggs where they had pin pricked parts of them out until they were the most amazing lattices with gorgeous pictures embedded in them.  Those were around 200 Euro.  We decided to stick with a few painted ones.  These are actually painted and then the design is scraped into it with a razor. 

We had three (one for Emma- the butterfly one, one for me the red, and one for Max- the Green.)  You can't see the green, because Max already broke it.  Smashed!  12 Euros down the toilette!  Not even a picture to commemorate it.  

We also bought the three goose eggs which are already blown out for us.  They had every variety of egg to choose from.  We almost got a peking duck one, but it was a lot thinner than the goose eggs.  With all the moving that we do, we decided we better get some hardy eggs!  We will try our hand at decorating them later.

After getting our eggs and looking around the kloster a little, we had butterwaffeln with puderzucker .  Emma and Dad didn't think they wanted any, but they ate half of Max and Mom's!  

I love it when I overhear people's conversations and learn about amazing things like this Easter Market in Maulbronn!

First, Second and Third

This is the first known picture of the these two friends.

This is the second Master's degree for Robert, but definitely the hardest.  In his first Master's degree he didn't have to write a thesis.  For this one he had to do 86 credit hours and write an entire book- over 90 pages.  This was the happiest day of his life from the last 3 years!

Congratulations to Rob on his Master's in Nuclear Engineering!

Rocket science is for those who dropped out of Nuclear Engineering!

This was our third and final Easter egg hunt with our Ohio Family!

Only Joseph and Max were able to participate this time, 

although Emma filled and hid the eggs with the rest of the young women.

Both Joseph and Max were in the last group to find eggs, too- the Senior Primary!

Say WHAT?  

Our little family is certainly growing up!

BTW- all of these pictures (except the graduation photos) were taken on Manual- I'm getting better!

Easter Bundting

I don't know what happened this year- seriously!  I'm busy, but just at normal levels of " Spring busy."  I just never got out the decorations for Easter or did a reading with the children or got the Easter eggs dyed.  Easter Eve we went downstair, after tucking the children all into bed, and had to find the Easter baskets to fill.  I had bought candy and new Sunday outfits, at least!

The sacrificial bunny!  Everyone gets a Cadbury Chocolate bunny in their baskets and we eat them one at a time, cut into pieces.  Those things are over 800 calories a piece!

Rob stopped getting new clothes, because he is extremely picky and he refuses to shop.  I can not, for the life of me, get that man out of his 80's and early 90's clothes.  Therefore, I ignored him when I shopped. 

Trying to get a picture of all the new Easter outfits was not an easy job, either. 

Now that Sam is a deacon, his clothing are boring beyond belief.  He got a new tie, another white shirt and pair of Khakis.

He was not impressed.  He never has been- with Sunday clothes.  When he was little he used to spit on them and tell me they were too wet to wear.  He tried everything to get out of those clothes.  Now he just takes them off as soon as possible.  

Emma's dress I had to find on line. 

You just can't find a decent Junior's dress out there.  You can't find a decent Women's dress out there any more either.  It's like the whole world decided that dresses were stupid and they were no longer going to wear them.  I don't mind wearing skirts and blouses, but I like dresses every now and again.  Emma's dress is from Down East Basics, mine from Shabby Apple.

That is a really bad picture, but Rob would only take one!

 Both of them are Utah based companies.  

We had a quick bite of chocolate early in the morning and then headed to church.

I enjoyed Sacrament meeting, but in Young Women's they did a lot on the death of the Savior.  You should have heard the song that was performed at the end.  It was morbid!  They lightly touched on the suffering in the garden, but never mentioned the Resurrection.  It left me... not happy.  I mean there is a reason we don't wear crosses like our other Christian brothers and sisters!  We believe that the most important parts were the sacrifice in the garden and the Resurrection.  True, he couldn't have been resurrected if he didn't give up his life.  Anyway, I just feel like it ends up being a let's make everyone cry session instead of a let's wonder about the condescension of God and his miraculous gift to each of us lesson- which makes me dread Easter more often than not.

After we got home, we made the dinner (yep didn't even make rolls before hand, this year!) and everyone colored an egg. 

After dinner, we decided we needed some fun, though, so we called a couple friends to come over and we did a flashlight Easter Egg hunt. 

We staggered the start, so that the little kids got to go out ahead.  We went from youngest to oldest and made them wait 15-20 seconds between each- Ok, by the time we got to Samuel, we really didn't make them wait that long, because Sam is super speedy!  Look what we found while we were hiding eggs

- a real nest with robin eggs!

They looked so fake!

I couldn't remember what we traditionally had for dessert on Easter.  Is there even an Easter dessert tradition?  I don't know.  So we decided to make one.  Behold- Easter cake! 

It is strawberry bundt cake with lemon icing and strawberries all around it.  It was yummy!

I think everyone had a great time- we just didn't get rid of enough chocolate.  Next time, we need more friends!

Our kind of Easter

Ah Easter- the time to color beautiful eggs, get dressed up in your new outfits for church, frolic while hunting carefully hidden eggs, and eat the ears off of unsuspecting chocolate bunnies! Is there anything better- well if only it was a reality!
Our eggs were camouflaged and had pictures of dinosaurs eating Emma or large flowers stepping on Joseph drawn on them. Mine was one of the only normal ones. (I wrapped it in lace before coloring it.)
As for new outfits- I had to shoot just the top halves of them, because they were too silly to stay still and ended up putting grass stains on themselves when they ended up like this! Even Robert ran upstairs and got changed before I could get a picture with him- stinker!
The eggs for the church were not carefully hidden- I know, because I was the supervisor of all those teenagers who were doing the hiding- more like flinging the eggs! And there was very little frolicking, since the eggs were scooped up so fast, there were almost none left, by the time my kids got outside. (despite the fact they were told they could only have 10 a piece!) The kids had fun posing for pictures, anyway! Luckily, we made up for the lack of egg finding, at home. Sunday after a good dinner of ham and potatoes we had a flashlight Easter egg hunt downstairs. It's been raining for days, so outside was a no go. The flashlight egg hunt went over well, though!
Easter morning is always fun when you get to eat straight sugar for breakfast! Rob decided the boys just had to have golf clubs their size so they could hit with him downstairs. They loved that. I also got them Risk, because they had been asking for it. Rob was really happy about that, since he had to spend the morning showing them how to play the game!! Emma got a gift certificate to Claires.
It was a nice Easter, with a great message in the end. We were so busy, with soccer games and my working full-time, that we didn't get much in about Christ. I felt terrible about it. These are the days I am thankful for great teachers at church. Max came home with a drawing of Christ in the sky and told me all about it. Next year we will do better, because although we'll never have the poster Easter experience, I really do want to teach my children what it's really all about!