Life is Beautiful: Easter with the cousins

It is so nice having 2 of Ehren's siblings so close now and we get to spend almost all the holidays together. Easter egg hunt is just one of the things the kids really look forward to. Even though it was a bit cold, kids loved looking for the plastic eggs all over Mark & Audrey's yard. It is just fun to watch them having fun together and enjoying each other. Aveah is the youngest at 18 months so no more babies in the family, at least for now. It is both nice and sad. It is definitely easier to get together as the kids are getting older which is great for us moms. Ingrid brought her Easter story eggs which basically goes through the whole story from the Bible, remembering little details of each stage that Jesus and people around him went through. Kids really enjoyed opening those eggs and finding out what the next piece of the story was. It was good to start with the real meaning of Easter too before we had a good meal and the egg hunt.

I grew up looking for an Easter basket at our house but I haven't really implemented it yet with our kids because I thought they got enough candy and stuff at the egg hunt. But this year I thought, it doesn't have to be much and it will make the kids so excited to do something just with them at our house, not with all the cousins. A while ago I bought a couple Christian books for Kade which we were just going to give him to read, but I kept them so I would put them in the basket for him. Then I bought a little book for Kason and a little painting book for Ani. I had to get a Lindt chocolate bunny for each of them though :) because it's a thing from my childhood. So kids went to bed on Saturday night not knowing anything because if I told them about it they would be up before 6am. I hid 8 or 9 plastic eggs around the house with messages inside them and the kids had a little scavenger hunt for the basket. I actually didn't even tell them what they were looking for in the end so they were so excited to discover the basket. I put messages in the eggs like :"find me where a girl sleeps", "find me where the food cooks", "find me where the clothes get washed" so they were pretty easy for all the kids to guess and they had a blast looking for the clues. I was really glad I took the 15 minutes the night before to do that because it meant so much to the kids. It really doesn't need to be anything big or overly done, just a simple game and they are so excited about it. I'm going to have to come up with a bunch of games like those for this summer when the school is done because I know the days are coming when they'll say there's nothing to do and they're bored. :)