Easter 2014 (according to Eliza)

This is a guest post by ELIZA (Saren Loosli's amazingly wonderful daughter who is currently 11 years of age - yep, Eliza dictated that part to me - glad she's such a confident girl!):

We had a great Easter this year!

A lot of the things we did for Easter week were things like reading from the scriptures, talking about the actual places in Israel where things happened and looking them up on the Internet (like the Garden Tomb), and watching videos about the true story of Easter. But I don't have pictures of those things. We didn't quite think of taking pictures of that stuff - and actually those would be pretty boring pictures. 

Here is some pictures of us dying Easter eggs this year. 

The first egg that we dye is always red. This is a Bulgarian tradition, and symbolizes Jesus's sacrifice on the cross for us (the red symbolizes the blood Jesus shed for us and the egg represents new life). Once this egg is dyed, we wipe a thin streak of red on the youngest child's head- Silas. That's just how they do it in Bulgaria so we do it that way.

  

We love to try new and interesting patterns. On some eggs, we put on painters tape in a cool shape before we dye them, so after the egg dries, we take off the tape, and we have cool patterns. We also like to dye half of the egg one color, and another half another color.

 Here is our eggs towards the beginning of the whole egg-dying process.

                                                                    

Here we are towards the end:

 

Now the eggs are ready to eat. Another Bulgarian tradition that we have is to "chuke" our eggs. This basically means that two people stand by each other and say 1-2-3 chuke. Then they knock their eggs together to see whose egg would crack first. This year, Isaac was the winner out of everyone. His egg never cracked!

Then we had a neighborhood egg hunt a few days later.

 Here are all of the kids that came:                         

When we woke up on Saturday morning, we got ready to go downstairs and see if the Easter bunny came.


When we went downstairs, we saw a bunch of ropes everywhere. It looked like our whole house was like a spider web. It was really hard to go downstairs because we had to jump over ropes and dodge underneath them. This was the first time our Easter bunny ever morphed into an Easter spider!

This is how our living room looked:

We had no idea what was going on. Our dad explained that we needed to follow the rope with our name on it to get to our Easter baskets.

Our ropes led us all the way upstairs and down.

 Our ropes even led us outside!

When we got to the end of our ropes, we found our Easter baskets in rather unusual hiding places. Then we all got together to check out what we got. We were so excited to see what we got in our Easter baskets.

 We each got something gummy and fruity. I got citrus flavored gum drops that were simply irresistable. Ashton got gourmet jelly beans (he freaks out about jelly beans). Isaac got mango gummies (he loves mango). Silas got - in Oliver's words - "juice infused gummy penguins" (he loves penguins). Oliver got gourmet gummy bears because he loves cute animals. We also got Cadbury's cream eggs and chocolate bars and oranges  hopping or flipping chicks or bunnies.

Me and my mom were looking for something to get my dad for Easter and we found this chocolate at one of our favorite stores. It's milk chocolate covered beef jerky. My dad really liked it. He let me try some of it and it really wasn't my favorite.

 Here's a peek at our hopping wind-up bunny and chick races:

Here we are on Easter morning. After we watched some videos about the resurrection (there were some really good one here), we had our favorite breakfast of the year - eggs benedict.

Then we went to church and church was awesome. My mom did a lesson in primary and showed a really good video about Jesus and how he died for us and got resurrected. Everyone liked it a lot. But one little girl who is new at church started really crying loud  when Jesus died. I thought it was good that she cared so much. But she was really happy when she saw that He got resurrected.I am glad that Jesus cared enough about me and the whole world to die for us so that we can live again.

After church, my mom wanted to take Easter pictures of everyone in their new Easter clothes but the boys changed out of their clothes too fast because for some reason they don't like posing for pictures in their uncomfortable church clothes. So the only people who could do pictures were me and my mom. We're the only people who like pictures anyway so it was fine.

For some reason, Ashton took this picture from far away. I liked how my shoes ended up matching my mom's dress. I can almost fit into my moms shoe size.

Happy Easter!