Easter 2012

I just realized that I have not even posted pictures from Easter yet so I'm sorry these are late but at least they're getting up on the blog!  :)

Some of us ladies in the neighborhood got together and did an Easter egg hunt over at the park for the kids while they were on Spring Break.

We had Abi's two little friends, Alexis and Ariana, spend the night before so they came with us and here they are all ready to go with their bunny ears and Easter egg hair. 

We had a great turn out and there were tons of eggs for the kids to go find.  Tater-Tot loved finding his eggs. 

We had some play time at the park afterwards and the kids enjoyed eating the treats inside their eggs.

We kind of left our Easter egg dying until the last minute this year but the kids were not about to let the holiday slip by without this tradition.     

We tried some new tricks with rubber bands and sparkles and the kids really had fun with that. 

We ended up with some beautiful eggs. 

These little scuba divers were by far the favorites though and everyone got to make one.

We started a new tradition this year and the night before Easter we had the kids plant some jellybeans in the back yard and we told them a little story along with it and said that on this one night there is magic and they needed to wake up in the morning and see what had grown.

They were amazed to go out and see these suckers growing up right where they had planted their jellybeans!  (This was a hit and will definitely happen again next year!)

They also found a table full of goodies that the Easter bunny had left them. 

Each of the kids got a little "Candy" basket that was made out of some of our favorite Easter treats. 

They each got some surprises too and Tate LOVED his new lion.  

We had an early church meeting so we told the kids they could look at their baskets more later and we hurried and got them ready for church in their cute Easter clothes.   The boys had darling matching ties. 

When we got back from church we were surprised to see that the Easter bunny had come during our meetings and left a ton of eggs to hunt in the back yard.  

The kids quickly grabbed their baskets and got to work!

Tate was all over this egg hunting thing and he had a basket full by the end. 

Bridger was very serious about the whole thing and he even grabbed two baskets to collect his eggs. 

Abi was the first to discover that not all the eggs had candy inside and this got her very excited. 

This year there were a variety of special coupons inside the eggs like "movie of your choice", "dinner of your choice", "get out of one chore", "stay up past bedtime", and several others.  This is another thing that will have to be repeated next year because the kids are protecting their coupons as if they were gold and cash them in as they like.  (Except for Bridger who had all of his cashed in within a few days!) 

It was a great Easter full of great memories and great food but most of all we got to really teach the kids about the meaning of Easter and that was really special.