He Is Risen!!!

Easter--my favorite holiday and best day of the year. So thankful for the resurrection of Christ and what it means for us on a daily basis. And now almost 2 weeks later, I am posting pictures from our wonderful day.

Matt was on-call, so we stayed home for the weekend. The kids were so excited to look for their easter baskets in the morning and of course, the youngest found his first!!!

And then Sadie...

And finally Wyatt. His is always the hardest to find (intentionally) and he gets so frustrated after about 15 minutes (which I am sure feels like an eternity!) I remember as a kid not being able to find mine and having to leave for church without finding it--I'm sure that day will come!

We went to church and as happens every year on Easter, I cry through most of the service, overwhelmed at God's grace for me and the power of the resurrection.

After we got home, we parked the car in the driveway (I don't even remember why we did this) and before we even got in to the house, these ducks were on our car!

There were 3 of them and the kids ran inside and got some bread to feed them! Crazy, huh?

Pics of the kids...

We were trying to get a picture of the 3 kids since we didn't have anyone around to take a family picture, but Blake didn't want to let go of Matt's hand...

The kids were exhausted from a busy saturday outside, so everyone in our family crashed for awhile after lunch. But then it was on to the egg hunt preparations.....

There is a HUGE egg hunt in our development, but each year we skip it and do a smaller version in our own yards with just a few neighborhood families. But this year several of our neighbors hosted Easter at their homes, so we had a few more kids to add to the hunt. Since there were so many with such a broad age range, we did three separate age groups--(1-5) (6-11) (12-20). We (the moms) actually had a lot of fun making the egg hunts progressively harder and boy did we stump the kids. The oldest group thought they had found all the eggs at our neighbors but when we added it up, they still had 30 to find!! It took awhile, but by this point all the kids helped out and some of the younger kids were able to find them more easily than the older kids!

Getting ready...

Blake had lots of helpers!!

Gracie stuck with him the whole time and Lillie helped him out as well.

The youngest age group each got to find 18 eggs and since Blake took the longest, he ended up with the largest following of kids cheering him on! And he loved it!!

And as happens every year, once he realizes what is inside them, he's content to sit in one spot and chow down!

Perfect timing for the next age group to go.

Wyatt and Titus

Checking out their loot..

Each of these kids got 18 eggs as well, so Terri and Gracie were counting up her eggs to see how many more she needed!

There were 5 eggs with $1 in them and Wyatt was pretty stoked to get one of them!

There were a few clever hiding spots!

Despite Blake's persistence, there were no eggs inside the sprinkler system unit.

The oldest age group opted to do a 'free for all' instead of setting a certain number of eggs for each kid...so once they thought they had found them all, we counted all of them to see if they had in fact gotten them all. And no they didn't---30 left to find!!

And the dads....deep in conversation!

Another great egg hunt in the books!! And thank goodness for warmer, dry weather!