Overview of Easter 2024

 

Now that my kids are all grown up, I really miss doing all the Easter Week activities we used to do. I had a bit of a hard time as I looked back at all the fun things we used to do for each day of holy week and wondered if much of that sunk in. It's sure hard to tell what efforts really paid off when you have "baby adults" who are still figuring a lot of things out. But I'm so grateful for the excellent people they have become and it's nice to catch glimpses once in a while of some things I taught them or showed them that they have really embraced. I'm so grateful we were able to have ALL our kids together for Easter morning and a few of them around for other parts of Easter weekend.  A couple of the kids were able to help with our traditional neighborhood Easter egg hunt on Saturday. I was pretty stressed out about the weather forecast but despite the rain, we had a great turnout!

Eliza helped hide the eggs and Ashton starred as the Easter Bunny this year:

On Sunday morning, we watched a couple quick and beautiful videos together (there are so many good "Because of Him" videos - this is one of my favorites) then the kids got their Easter Baskets. While I don't do new church clothes along with their baskets anymore, I still like to give them some sort of clothing item as a symbol of the renewal of Easter. This year I decided to do shirts with some sort of a nature theme to further the symbol of new life and celebrate the beauty that God created for us. I also gave them nice hand soap as a symbol of the unconditional cleansing and renewal offered by Christ's atonement. Now that they are all living on their own, having some fancy hand soap is a fun little luxury!

We finished our Easter morning with our traditional eggs benedict brunch which is always a big hit! They all pitch in to make it and it's so nice having everyone working together in the kitchen then enjoying a tasty fancy meal together.

Then my oldest and his wife took off to be with her family and the rest of the kids stayed on to go to church, dye Easter eggs, and do a little Easter egg hunt for eggs filled with candy and money. We added "money eggs" to the mix a few years back and the high-stakes eggs brought new life to our egg hunting! With all the rain and snow as well as a time crunch, we did our traditional Easter after-church pictures via self timer and inside the house this year - and our attempt to get the dog in the photo made for some good smiles!

We finished the day with an extended family dinner at my parents' house where it was snowing like crazy - felt more like Christmas than Easter! In the midst of all my planning and executing and trying to figure out who could come for what when and what to do and not do, I sometimes felt totally stressed and overwhelmed. I felt a lot of pressure to make this year extra special since we didn't have Liza with us (she was on a mission in Chile) and we won't have the twins with us for the next 2 years (they'll be on missions in Guatemala and Mexico). But when I had the presence of mind to remember the message of Easter itself - "God is in charge and it'll all work out in the end" - everything felt much better. Lots of things turned out differently than I might have envisioned, but it was a beautiful Easter!