Easter weekend 2012

On Saturday morning, we hosted an Easter party for some neighbors and had a grand time. Most of the people where we live have never heard of Easter and have no idea why it's celebrated. It's a fun and natural way to talk about the hope that we have. We started out by decorating cookies with the kids. I'm learning to make my icing MUCH less sweet and it seems to be working; nobody complained about the cookies being too sweet this time. Then we moved on to dyeing eggs. I'll admit; there were one or two of these little ones I was scared to give access to food-colored water, but they did great and were much less messy than I anticipated. I think they thought the whole concept of coloring eggs was fun but pretty strange.

But the 1st graders got into it and took great care to decorate their eggs.

Little ShanShan is hilarious. She was fascinated with the colors and wanted to make sure she took some eggs home to her dad.

The hunt begins.

Here's most of the crew post-hunt. I think the parents enjoyed it as much as the kids. We had a big lunch at the dumpling restaurant across the street afterwards.

On Saturday late afternoon, Kevin and I took the girls out to play right before the heavens opened up and poured down RAIN. Now, usually we'd be upset to be caught in a storm, but we've been in a draught for a while and have experienced horrible water outages. So, we let the girls play in the rain until we had to seek shelter in a public bathroom. Gross, I know, but having to skip showers and only occasionally flush will lead you to do a weird happy dance in a public restroom when it finally rains. On Sunday morning, it rained again so we changed the outdoor fellowship plans we had with friends. But we still enjoyed an Easter brunch, had worship together, and my girls got to wear their beautiful dresses Nana and Pappaw sent from America.

I know I'm totally biased, but the cuteness-factor was off the charts. Trinity requested to wear her dress on Monday and Tuesday as well. Time to wash. You did good, Nana.

Since we had a rainy day and already enjoyed an egg hunt, we hunted chocolate eggs from America inside the house...

and made an empty tomb out of cupcakes, oreos, and coconut dyed green for the grass.

I'm so thankful that Grace seems to be grasping more and more the message of the gospel. She's been asking lots of good questions and I believe He's working in her heart. One of my favorite memories of the weekend was hearing Kevin talk with her about the Resurrection. He is risen; He is risen, indeed!!

March was milestone month

There are times when I step back and feel like my girls are growing up in fast-forward. March was one of those months.

Early in March, Grace began reading to her sister from time to time. It was fun to walk into the room and catch them like this! Score!

Then Grace lost one of her front teeth. The other front tooth is loose. She laughs about how funny she talks now.

And next, Grace decided it was time to learn to ride a bike. She'd been asking her daddy for a while now to take off the training wheels, and one beautiful Saturday morning he agreed. She learned very quickly and is zipping all over the place now.

And as for my little one? We've finally had the time at home + motivation + lack of cold weather/layers to get some serious potty training done. I'm one of the worst potty-trainers in the world, but this one is making great progress in spite of her mother.

There's just no denying how quickly these girls are growing.